


Liber Scriptus Proferetur

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume I [3]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, d'Artagnan Romances (Three Musketeers Series) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Sex, Blasphemy, Blood Drinking, Blow Jobs, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Rimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-05 08:20:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4172643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the picaresque adventures of vampire and demigod continue, the honeymoon in the company of Thanatos and Eros turns out to be a most invigorating affair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We're just so honored and happy to be here <3 And to make the world a better place with this piece of blasphemous and pornographic weirdness.

**Krakow, Poland - 1394**

Back in those days, Krakow wasn’t quite in the grasp of the Polish Golden Age, yet, while King Casimir was dead, it did have that certain air of a city about to burst into bloom, like a jasmine blossom which gives off its pervasive perfume even without unfurling its petals. That was Krakow. It called, it beckoned. It’s where one went if one fancied himself an artist, or a craftsman of particular skill. 

Me, my one skill set was war. It was all I knew, it was all I had been groomed to excel in. And for the first time in my long life, I was allowing myself to be guided by a different passion. But in that passionate whirlwind I often found myself without a purpose. An observer, as it were, and happy only because the object of my idle observations was so beautiful to behold.

Aramis held me in thrall. His mind, just like his body, pushing back against the spikes and ridges of my own. He was a string on an Olympian lyre, and the more I plucked at it, the more magnificent his music was to my ears. Orpheus would have surely opened the gates to the Underworld without having to sing a note, had he such a lyre. In those early days of our companionship, I bandied about like a unmoored ship at sea, feeling more intoxicated than ever despite not a drop of anything fermented passing my lips. I looked for flaws in him and after each examination found none.

But then, I had never seen him kill. I have never seen that side of him, this demon that laid claim to one of his souls. When we lay together, he drank from me, yes, but he had been my chyortik in those moments. _Mine_ , my own. He took nothing from me that I was unwilling to part with, including my heart. Out there, however… it had been a different matter entirely.

When it finally happened, as it was inevitably going to happen, sooner rather than later, I had not been prepared for it. We were walking back from a tavern, more drunk on each other than on the Polish ale, through the kind of reeking and dark alleyway that stray dogs would feign to turn into. He still had his monkish robes on, for which I gave him no quarter.

“It simply doesn’t flatter your girlish figure,” I jibed.

“Do you actually _want_ me to unwind this rope and use it to throttle you?”

“It would be an infinitely better use of rope than to be cinching that potato sack around your hips.”

“Keep talking about my hips that way, and you may never see them again.”

An empty threat. Yet, I couldn’t help but relish the flush of his skin while he chastised me. In a matter of minutes, I had a tendency to go from ‘old man’ to ‘you child’ and back to something much more primordial.

A drunken brute, reeking of stale urine and even more stale beer stumbled past us, knocking against Aramis with his unwieldy frame and scattering the manuscripts my beloved had been working on translating right out of his lily white hands. That alone would’ve earned him a solid thrashing, one that I was just about to deliver, when he had the misfortune of opening his rancid mouth.

“Idźta do czorta, skurwysyny parszywe!”

I had never seen Aramis’ fangs drop before, which was curious because I have had my entire hand in his mouth. They are simply not there when he doesn’t want them to be. And when he wants them, I suppose he just _pops_ them down, like two deadly erections set upon a violent course. Like that night. I actually heard the soft _click_ of them descending against his lower canines.

“Aramis, don’t.” 

I placed my hand upon his arm. It wasn’t worth it, and besides, the man in the alley was disgusting. I wouldn’t have lowered myself to come within sniffing proximity, and I could only imagine that Aramis’ heightened senses must have rebelled equally at the idea. His eyes flashed at me as the drunkard stumbled away. 

“He wasn’t worth it,” I said, helping him pick up the dropped manuscripts.

There was something terrifying about Aramis’ face. The way it was there before me, yet at the same time I could feel that half his senses had left, and had been following the man who had offended him. His mouth was set in a ferocious line and his eyes gave off a preternatural glow. His nostrils flared.

“Don’t do it. It’s not safe.” I had read the intentions in his face clearly enough. “No point in risking exposure like that.”

He didn’t need that man’s blood; not when he had mine. But this, whatever this was, it wasn’t about need.

Without a word, Aramis rose with the books in his hands and placed them into my arms. He turned with the same speed that had impressed me so upon the battlefield of our first encounter and moved down the alley, appearing to glide without touching ground. He did not run, for I never saw the soles of his feet, but it was no walk of a man either.

“Hera’s cunt!” I exclaimed, helpless to control myself from invoking the most terrifying thing I could have thought of, and took off after him.

The man, the _quarry_ , had managed to stumble a few streets off. Of course, his progress mattered very little in the face of a nocturnal predator such as my flittermouse. He had made it to his own doorstep, or so I suspect by the familiar way in which he palmed at the door, yet before he could unlatch it, death swooped upon him from behind. His last cries were stifled and I heard the breaking of his bones beneath my beloved’s grip.

I have never seen him feed before, truly feed, for the joy of the hunt, for the rush of the vengeance, and it took my breath away. He had sunk to his knees, dragging his victim with him, into his lap. I watched the man’s life ebb away from where I stood, transfixed, enraptured by what I saw. Aramis had his teeth in the man’s jugular but it must have been merely symbolic, for the poor sod’s neck was long broken. He snarled and tore at the jugular like a wildcat, playing with his meal for the sake of play.

“Aramis,” I called his name and his eyes snapped towards mine. For a moment, I suspected he had forgotten I had been there. Or perhaps he truly had not expected me to follow him. “Let’s go home.”

He let the deadman drop to the ground and rose slowly to his full height so we could stand face to face. He spat the remnant of the blood out onto the cobblestones, likely refusing to savor the bouquet of such an inferior vintage. And then his eyes alighted on the distinct tenting of my own clothes.

“You deviant,” his face contorted into a crooked grin as he wiped the blood off his lips with the back of his hand. “Is there _anything_ about me that doesn’t set your loins aflame?” He stepped over the corpse at his feet and stood before me, his tongue methodically licking the remaining drops of blood from his fangs.

Now, I am not one to kneel before any man. I have had to kneel in my day, it’s true, to certain gods and various kings (although not Alexander, he would not have me kneeling to him, which is why I had loved him), but it isn’t a practice that comes easily to me. Yet, in the blood soaked darkness of that alley, I looked upon the man I had been sharing my bed with, and he appeared to me a vengeful god. Something primal, something from the First Pantheon. Cronus devouring his children.

“No,” I confessed and dropped to my knees, as if compelled.

He retracted his fangs and his hand came to rest on top of my head, akin to a benediction, and then his fingers tangled in my hair. The alley was dark, but I suppose at any moment someone may have emptied a chamber pot out the window, if not stuck a nosey visage out to see what all the fuss had been about. Still, I didn’t give a damn. He was standing only a foot away and my hands easily reached underneath the irritatingly copious folds of his monk’s robe.

“What do you want? Tell me.” His finger cupped my chin and lifted my face up so that I could see that familiar look of amusement upon his face. Blood rushed to the very tips of my ears, and I could feel my pulse thrumming through my whole body. Now that he was sated on the blood of another, would he still care for the beating of my own heart? And what _did_ I want, except the one thing that had consumed me?

“You,” I replied and sank my fingers into the flesh of his thighs, drawing him nearer.

“You’ve never done this before.” He sounded awed. Well, _good_. It wouldn’t do for a man not to appreciate the divine gifts he was about to be given.

Finally, after what felt like interminable moments of exploration underneath the endless robes, my hand found what it had been seeking and he gasped as I wrapped my fingers around his shaft. He leaned against the wall, pulling me with him, my knees scraping against the cold cobblestones as I followed him. Obligingly, he moved the offensive clothing away so his prick could spring proud and free from their confines, and I wasted no time wrapping my lips around it.

His hands had returned to grasp at my hair, not pulling but hanging on as if he was afraid to fall off the ride. I loved the sting on my skull from their pull, just as I loved the feel of the cobblestones digging into my knees. Perhaps I was getting too used to the overstimulation of copulating with him while having my blood drained. Perhaps I had always enjoyed a side dish of pain with my pleasure. Regardless, I let out a lusty moan around his cock, loving the heaviness of it against my tongue, the way he seemed to fill not only my mouth but all of my senses. I cupped him with my hand, gently stroking the sensitive flesh with my fingers, while my tongue explored each vein and skinfold of his throbbing flesh. I had never done this before _with anyone_ , and I wondered if he could tell, or whether he attributed my uncertain explorations to the general wonderment with which I tended to approach most of our love-making.

“Athos,” the fingers around my hair tightened, as if warning me to pull away, but I felt greedy and wanted to taste all of him. Would his demonic and human essences comingle into something indelibly _Aramis_ upon my tongue? I pulled up, to make sure all that ambrosia did not just disappear down my throat, and looked up at him. Our eyes met and he lost control, one hand clawing at the bricks of the wall behind him, while the other pulled at my hair as if reining in a galloping stallion.

I took the time to savor him before I swallowed it down, and then he pulled me up off my knees and kissed me breathless against that wall until I too spent myself in his hand. And when did he even put his hand there? My mind felt adrift. I let my head fall back against the wall with a heavy thud. Above us, the new moon barely shed light upon the gruesome scene.

Aramis took a few steps over to the abandoned corpse of the man he killed and made the sign of the cross over him. 

“ _Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen._ ”

I almost laughed.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

***

The body was bathed in blood. Like if the Tatars had tortured him, his bones smashed to bits and his entrails torn out, squashed under him, scattered around him.

No. There were no entrails, his neck was broken, bone snapped clean through. It was a henchman what had done it, or a man with a sword.

No Tatars and no gentleman with a sword had done it neither. He was ripped to shreds by claws, like from a giant bird. They have ‘em giant birds in the East, I heard about them.

The heathens brought them. Nothing like that ever happened under King Władysław the Elbow-high. It’s ‘em pagan spirits, they’ve come to the city with the Lithuanians. I heard about ‘em, heard about ‘em feed on the living. They feed on blood, on human blood, and on livestock too. They come out at night. In daylight, you can’t tell, they look just like us. They could be anyone. You can’t tell, unless you know how to look.

A shepherd knows how to look. Shepherds are wise men, they know how to find them and how to destroy them.

Shepherds? Let me tell you about shepherds. There was one in the mountains where I grew up. My grandfather told me about him. One night, there was a scratching and a caterwauling at the door, and the great-aunt, she was sitting up with the newborn babe that night, she unbolted the door, and it rushed in.

It swooped down on the crib and it tore the babe apart and gorged on his blood. And the shepherd stood at the threshold, his staff in his hand, and he watched and watched. The great-aunt, she ran out and threw herself down before him and clasped his knees. Begged him, begged him to call it back. And the babe was being eaten alive.

Must’ve been a rabid dog. Or a rat. Not one of _them_. _They_ don’t feed on flesh. They come at night, silent-like, like a _mara_ , like pestilent air. They creep to the bed and they crouch on your breast. They bite through your skin, they drink your blood, and they drink and drink and drink, and the next morning, your arms and legs are weak, your heart is racing and your head is dizzy. Your breath is short and your face is blue. I’ve seen it, seen it happen. Seen men blue in the face keel over and die in broad daylight when the _strzygoń_ had drained them at night.

No, no, that’s not them what drain you of blood. At midday, it’s the _południca_ , Lady Midday, she roams the fields. She comes upon you in the heat of the midday sun, in the whirling cloud of dust. Once she’s close enough, once you see the dust take the shape of a woman what carries a scythe, it’s too late. If she don’t kill you, she leaves you babbling and drooling for the rest of your life, not right in the head, touched by evil.

No, them what come in the night, they jump on your back. And you can’t shake them off, they cling to you, stick to you, like if they had grown out of your body. And your body, it's yours and not yours: it moves, your legs move, and you start to run, and you run and run and run, and the ground breaks away and you run on air, and it’s like running in snow. Your legs are like lead, and your heart is beating, beating so that it bursts out of your breast, but you can’t stop, can’t stop, for as long as the strzyga is riding you. It rides you all night, fierce-like, feral. It rides you and won’t stop, till you almost drop dead. They ride horses too. When you come to the stable in the morning and your horse is panting and covered in foam, it is for a strzyga had ridden it.

Athos raised the flagon of wine to his lips and cast a sidelong glance at me. Fate, it seemed, had decided that we were to spend the night in the company of men whose taste for blood matched my own – albeit merely in theory. They revelled in stories of assorted spirits of the night without paying us any heed.

St. John’s Eve. Kupala Night. Midsummer Night. Summer solstice. The shortest night of the year went by many names, and the further north one went in Europe, the greater the fervour with which it was celebrated. The ancient pagan rite had survived the purge brought on by the Cross; it had seeped into the Christian calendar and morphed into the nativity of St. John the Baptist.

Beside me, Athos leaned over the ramparts. A gust of wind swept up his hair and a tendril brushed silkily across my cheek. Crammed into confined space, our bodies touched from foot to shoulder. He pressed his hand against my thigh, and my muscles shuddered beneath his fingers.

Beneath us, there was the night sky. We had climbed the bell tower to watch the _sobótki_ , bonfires lit all over the plane across the river to celebrate the feast of St. John. The young men and women of Krakow had flocked to the fires to consult the gods of old about their future fortunes. They leaped over the flames to safeguard their health in the year to come. Later, the night would reverberate with the moans of their mating, bodies and souls paying tribute to long-discarded idols. Even without looking at him, I could feel Athos’ smirk as he watched those good Christians worship the banished pagan gods.

Above us, there was the night sky. “Can you see Heracles?” Athos had said, pointing at his half-brother. Forever immortalised in his suppliant position, praying to Zeus his father, Heracles also went by the ancient name _Ἐγγόνασιν_ – the Kneeler, which greatly amused my prideful demigod. Athos would rather his name turned to ash and was wiped out from the memory of mankind than have it attached to a supplicant for all eternity. (A minor victory over the famed Heracles, I felt, but one that gave Athos pleasure.)

The bell-ringers wallowed in the gruesome stories like swine in the finest mud, and I struggled to keep my fangs retracted. All that talk gave me an appetite. Surrounded by the heartbeat of many, I felt their blood pump around me in an erratic, disjointed rhythm. I turned my head towards Athos, focusing on the familiar pulse of his blood which throbbed into my flesh where our limbs touched. He sensed my hunger. His pulse quickened and he expelled his breath in sharp gasps. The hand that rested against my thigh moved; he dragged his nails over my wrist and my knuckles and pinched the flesh between my forefinger and thumb. “We should go,” he muttered, handing me the flagon with wine. When I put it to my lips, I fancied I could taste his mouth on the rim.

One of the bell-ringers caught the words, spoken in Athos’ melodious Russian. “Off to the woods, gentlemen?” he boomed. “Looking for the fern flower? When I was a young man, I tried to find it myself. But the evil spirits are cunning, they guard it well. Look out or they will drag you into the bog or bury you under tree roots.”

Athos glanced at me, smirking, and I smiled back, flashing my teeth at him. The fern flower, that mystical plant that bloomed on St. John’s Eve, granted every wish to the man who picked the elusive blue blossom before the first cock-crow. “Hardly,” Athos said, with more politeness than I would have expected. “That particular quest is the province of youth. And the gullible.”

I pushed him up against the wall and fastened my mouth and teeth to his neck in the darkness of the staircase. “If you want to go look for the magic flower, you only have to say.” The tendon under my mouth tautened and his throat vibrated half with a laugh, half with a moan.

“A magic flower?” he mock-mused with his mouth by my ear. “I’ve already plucked the only flower that I’d ever wished to pluck.” My heartbeat quickened and I nipped at the skin of his throat. It was the first time he alluded to the fact that he had been the first man who had taken me. I had never been sure if he knew, if he had guessed that I had never given myself to any man before him. For a moment, I felt quite the blushing bride as embarrassment, arousal and affection churned inside my chest like a potion in a witch’s cauldron. Memories of that night resurfaced – how many weeks ago had it been? Five? Seven? Ten? I had lost count in the same way that a man on a binge loses count of the mugs of ale he’d consumed. I too had been drunk then, inebriated on the taste and scent of him. And yet, I remembered the passion underlying the tenderness of his touch; the flushed skin of his chest and his neck as he sunk into me. The droplets of sweat that dripped on my brow when he leaned in, his breath hot against my mouth. That endless stream of intoxicating blood that sprung from his vein as if from the fountain of youth.

“Did you find your wishes granted?” I teased him, relishing in the familiar pressure of his hardness against mine.

“Every single one.”

The rest of his words, had he wished to utter any, was lost in a groan as I nicked his skin with my fangs. I didn’t break it; it was a mere scratch, not deep enough to draw blood, yet painful enough to make his body jolt into mine. “Every single one?” I whispered. “Surely, you’re not that easily satisfied?”

The wine flagon dropped from his hand and clattered down the steps. “Take me home,” he whispered, his body taut like a bow string I was about to twang.

His hands lay on my hips like they had done in the first night when I came to him. His brilliant eye was misted over and that mouth, that mouth… I leaned over him and kissed him, driving my tongue as deeply into his throat as he was driving his cock into me. The grip of his hands tightened and he pulled me in, pulled me down, pulled me even closer, even though that was not possible. He was sheathed inside me to the hilt and his heartbeat pulsed in my very core. “Aramis,” he sighed when I released his mouth with a playful nip at his lip. I raised myself off him and pushed back down, forcing a deep groan out of him.

“ _Aramis._ ” He was trying to rein me in, but I was having none of it. The slippery up-and-down slide along his shaft, the vapour that rose off his body and into my nostrils, the heavy thud of blood through his veins and muscles. I wanted it all, I wanted it to consume me before I even drank from him. The heat inside me, the heat around him rose with every shove of my hips. His abdomen glistened with the wetness of our mingled effusions: he had already spent himself inside me once, half-dressed and more than half-mad with lust, and our coupling was all the slicker, smoother, _filthier_ for it.

“What is it, Athos?” I plunged down and rubbed my pelvis into his, nestling my prick in the hair that covered his groin and stomach. His hand shot from my hip to my cock and he flattened his palm over it so that I could fuck myself into the moist heat. With his other hand, he lifted one of mine to his mouth, kissed my palm and then bit into the flesh of the Venus mount below my thumb. I grabbed his hair with a hiss and pressed my teeth to the side of his neck. He was shaking – with laughter or from over-exertion, I did not know. “I’m not going to stop,” I whispered in his ear, punctuating my words with harsh thrusts of my hips, until froth foamed between our bodies. “It rides you all night, remember? Fierce and feral. It rides you and won’t stop, until you can’t take it, until you almost drop dead.” I bit his earlobe. “Almost. Not quite.”

His hand alighted on the nape of my neck and he pulled me in for a kiss that rendered us both dizzy. “You can’t kill me, my fierce fiend.” His tongue swept over my lips. “No matter how feral you are.” His hips snapped up, slamming into me so hard my vision blackened and I cried out. “Don’t you ever forget that.”

I uncoiled and sprang myself from his grip, clutching his hand as I rose to my knees. His hips were digging into the insides of my thighs and my cock swung like a pendulum, describing a parabola whose apex was pointing at his face. My release would spray over his stomach and chest, and I pictured it shoot all the way to his throat, his mouth even, droplets catching in his beard and glistening on his lips. I unclasped his fingers from around mine and carried them to my lips, teasing the delicate pads with my teeth, one after another. He pushed three into my mouth and dragged them over my teeth, feeling for my fangs. When he found a sharp tip, he smiled with a corner of his mouth and locked his gaze with mine.

He watched me, lips parted and stomach shuddering, as I held his wrist to my lips and dug my fangs into his veins. His leg kicked out behind me and his stomach muscles contracted, jerking him up like a marionette. My mouth brimmed over with blood. He watched it drip down my chin, run down my throat, and he pressed his other hand to my chest as if to imprint himself on my skin. His blood-stained palm slid wetly over my skin.

“All night, if that’s what you want.” His voice was so hoarse I had to lean in to catch the words. “Ride me as long as you want.” I groaned and clenched my teeth, tearing through his tendons and all but crushing his bones. Athos arched between my legs, fucking himself into me in time with my thrusts, carrying me as effortlessly as a powerful war horse. His hand slid down my torso, wet heat sucked in my cock. I slipped through his bloodied grip and we both slipped off the ride: his suddenly-rigid body almost unseated me as he spilled himself inside me, and I spattered his chest and chin with my essence, stained with his blood.

His arms around me, his chin digging into the top of my head, and my mouth glued to his collarbone. To call it sleep would be inaccurate; it was a death-like state into which we had fallen, while aftershocks of our shared ecstasy echoed back and forth between us. I might have whimpered when his cock softened and slipped out. Athos stroked my hair with a shaky hand. “You’re mewing, kitten.” I bit down on the ridge of his collarbone in reply and felt him laugh. “I can tell you’re a feral creature of the night.” He tangled his fingers in my hair. “Are all your brethren as ferocious as you?”

“I see you’re not dead yet.” I passed my fingers over his lips. “Your mouth is certainly very lively. But-” I shifted and pressed my groin to his. “Other parts of you appear to have capitulated. Go to sleep, old man.”

“Are you declaring defeat? What happened to ‘all night’? You force me to declare you a disgrace for demonkind.”

I raised myself on my elbow and brushed his hair from his brow. “Such boastful talk. You’re only saying this, because tonight is the shortest night of the year.”

He laughed and seized my hips, dipping his thumbs into the dimples above my arse. “You’ve got until the first cock-crow.”

***

My besotted stupor inclined me to idleness, which crept into my bones and settled about my shoulders. I wasn’t entirely without employment, as my companion had occasion to accuse me of, I merely preferred a different type of employment to sitting there, buried with my face in some liturgical manuscript, transcribing or illuminating, or what have you. I may have been technically immortal, but my vessel was still human, and rebelled against the long hours of poor posture that accompanied such activities. (Although I may have on occasion stolen some theological text that Aramis had been hired to illuminate and drew charming little phalli in the margins. Luckily, he thought my pranks rather hilarious, although he had to really get in touch with his artistic Genius to cover my renderings up. Posterity is likely still scratching their heads at the depictions of nuns gathering phallic fruit from trees, as one such example.)

But I have not yet told you how I made my fortunes, although perhaps you might have guessed. Indeed, it was by killing people. No one too far beneath me, you understand, no women or children either (although, unlike my ‘contemporaries’ I did not consider women to be the weaker sex). It is always so, in every age, a heavy purse can procure what nature had not been generous enough to gift to a specimen. And men die, whether or not reaped by Death’s scythe or my own scimitar. Am I also not an instrument of the Gods? But, as you can imagine, I had standards: I never attacked from the back, and I never disappointed my employers.

I was just returning from one such errand, having dispatched what sounded by all accounts to have been the rankest of scoundrels, and feeling rather good about myself before I even sauntered into our shared apartment and tossed my weapons to the floor for Grigoriy to tend to. I caught a whiff of something decidedly nutty in the air and bit my lips to prevent any errant commentary from escaping. My lover paid a world of attention to his appearance, but his hands had been a particular point of lavish adulation for which purpose he employed a certain extortionate almond oil. Such extravagancies entertained and aroused me about as much as anything else he did.

Aramis had been sprawled on our bed, supine on his stomach, his nose predictably in a manuscript. He had somehow managed to be copying the text onto a new parchment, despite the fact that this required an intricate balancing act with his ink and quill. My pet demon didn’t do anything the simple way, it appeared.

“Nu?” he addressed me with the local colloquialism he had picked up. “Shall we eat human food tonight? Really, it is a blessing that I do not require mortal sustenance. Your gambling will surely soon lead to us having to eat Grigoriy.”

“Too gamey,” I shrugged, not rising to the bait. My darling was clearly in a _mood_ , as he would sometimes get when he hadn’t fed on blood for too long.

“It is a blessing that you do not also whore.”

“No whore in Krakow has the skin as soft and dulcet like the sweetest almond paste,” that time I could not hold myself back. He shot me a look that would have made a lesser man lose the contents of his bladder.

I tossed the heavy purse onto the bed next to him. “Chertyonok can buy himself a snack and new quills,” I gave him a small bow and began to remove my cloak and doublet.

“Oh, you’ve downgraded me from a chyortik to a chertyonok now?”

I have mentioned how astute my beloved was, picking up on nuances regardless of which language we spoke. The difference of course was that while the first constituted a ‘little devil’, the second had meant a ‘baby devil.’

“You do go out of your way to make your skin as soft as a baby’s bottom,” I teased, my eyes falling upon the jar of his precious almond oil on the stand.

“Do you think all this beauty that you admire so much just naturally maintains itself?” He spoke without turning back towards me, his lovely nose as ever hovering over his scribbling. I wondered if it had been a big Dionysian joke that I had fallen for a demon as studious as he was deadly.

I twisted the little jar in my hands pensively and kicked off my boots. He was already not wearing much, the loose material of his shirt clung to his body like a drape over a statue that begged only to be uncovered. I climbed onto the bed behind him, straddling his hips with my thighs, and pressed my hands to the bare skin underneath his shirt.

“No, my dear, this kind of deeply abiding beauty must be stroked and tended to with all the oils of Arabia, if only to pay it proper homage.” I was only part-jesting. Had I been as rich as I was proud, I would have bought all the oils of Arabia for the minx, and counted myself lucky to have such a lover to lavish luxuries upon.

He sniffed at the air, no doubt sensing what I was about to do. “Athos? Is that my almond oil?”

“Mmmhmmm.” I had taken a generous amount of it and began to rub it idly into the skin of his back.

“You child!” he fumed. “Do you even know how expensive that stuff is?” 

He somehow managed to move the ink and the quills off the bed before trying to buck me off like a terribly untrained young colt. I held him down with my hands, thumbs pressing into the column of his spine, bumping gently against each vertebra as I moved my hands into the dip of his lower back.

“All the more reason to put it to good use,” I muttered, losing a little of my focus as he moaned and curved his spine under my touch. I moved my hands to the perfect globes of his ass, kneading the muscle with slippery fingers. He held his breath, and had stopped trying to unseat me for the time being. “It’s not only your hands that need to be tended to, my Hyacinthus,” I said, running my hands up and down from his ass to his neck, loving the way his back undulated, supple and catlike beneath my touch.

“You utter profligate, who’s going to pay for this? It doesn’t grow on trees, you know!” But I could hear the laughter in his timbre more so than the proper heat of ire.

“Technically, almonds do grow on trees,” I pointed out and spread his cheeks apart with deft hands.

“I will murder you while you sleep,” he purred and pressed his chest into the bed, elevating his hips for me. I smiled watching him, the secret rosebud of his pucker practically winking at me from between his spread globes.

There was nothing I could do other than answer its beckoning call with my mouth, letting the flat of my tongue travel over the rippled, sensitive flesh. His gasp of surprise sent shivers of encouragement down my own spine. There was no part of him that I did not think tasted divine. I teased at the flesh with my tongue before grazing it with my teeth, biting and licking at it until it swelled up under my assault, until he was reduced to nothing but a babbling (likely in his mother tongue) mess upon our mattress. And when his fingers clutched at the pillow with knuckles so white I thought he might destroy the thing, I took some more of the almond oil and pressed it inside him.

“Oh, for the love of…”

“Don’t worry, my sweet,” I whispered against his trembling flesh, “I’ll take good care of you.”

“Then hurry!”

I laughed and bit one cheek hard enough to leave teeth marks. He bucked and presented himself to me, flushed and more gorgeous than before, hovering as he was between fury and passion. I spread him slowly with my fingers, the heady fragrance of the almond oil filling my nostrils as it mingled with his own distinct scent. I let my fingers linger on inside him, barely brushing against that spot that I knew would have him flying off the mattress if pressed.

“Athos, I swear on the Holy Mother, if you don’t get on with it, I _will_ murder you.”

I pressed a kiss to his shoulder blade, then peppered more of them along the rise to his neck, sucking the tender skin into my mouth as I positioned myself at his entrance. “Patience,” I whispered into the tender, pink skin of his earlobe before taking it between my teeth.

“Is not one of my virtues,” he squeezed out between his gritted teeth.

Nor was it mine, at that point, and I slid into his stretched opening until I was fully seated inside him. I did not know wherefore he had objected in the first place, that oil was much better used for this than to moisturize what was surely immortal skin.

“Move!” he commanded, ever the Kyrios of my heart. And I could not delay to obey him, thrusting into the viselike grip of his heat, rutting into him as his moans filled my ears. He could be as loud in this as he was silent in his killing. 

I ran my hands over his flanks and his chest as I rode him, seeming unable to get enough of the feel of his flesh against my own. I moaned into the back of his neck, my teeth worrying the skin covered in soft, downy hair, trying to mark him as deeply as he had ever marked me with his fangs. He moaned my name and it took all my considerable self-control not to spend myself right then. Instead, I reached up to interlace my fingers with his, making him let go of the pillow and hold on to me instead.

“Aramis… I… “ The words froze in my throat again and dissolved into a helpless moan. If he knew what I wanted to say, I did not know, only he brought my wrist to his lips and then I felt the sharp stab of his fangs against my tendons and veins. 

With my free hand, I grasped at his prick that was trapped between his perspiring body and the mattress, and jerked him in time with my increasingly erratic thrusts. He moaned against my wrist and I lost what little control I still had, spending myself inside him with the cry of a dying man. By the spasms of his body, I gathered he had followed me over that cliff, and I sank against him, overcome and exhausted. 

“Terrific,” I heard him say through my post-coital haze. “There’s blood all over the sheets again.”

“I don’t think Grigoriy will think you are a born again virgin, if that’s what you’re concerned with,” I smiled at him weakly.

“Don’t think I shan’t punish you for using my best oil for your nefarious purposes,” he purred, curled up like a hellcat against my side.

“Promises, promises.”

***

It wasn’t often that we were apart in those days. It was almost as if by feeding on his blood, I had become a part of him - or perhaps I had made him a part of me. With his blood pumping through my veins, we appeared to be joined into a single organism. His heartbeat pulsed through me, his blood sustained me. My nature was thus, as I had learned soon after my death, that I required neither food nor sleep as long as I fed on blood. By Athos’ side, I had begun to permit myself to embrace the oblivion of sleep on occasion, albeit reluctantly, guided by the throb of his heart: when it slowed, my own slowed also; when it quickened, my own quickened in response.

Sometimes, I would deliberately strain the tie between us, like a man who overstretches his tendons and muscles. I let myself sink into a different pulse, a different rhythm, and I enjoyed the cacophony that vibrated through me when the harmony of our joined heartbeat was upset. 

The heartbeat of the city was enveloping me now. It pulsed around me in the sound of bells of thirty churches. The whistle of flutes, the clang of trumpets, the chirp of pipes. Music hung above the city like a cloud. It was perhaps fitting that Krakow was the shape of a lyre: a semicircle to the north, a long neck stretching south towards the river where the castle stood.

Who was plucking its strings? Was it the young woman, who had been crowned king – _Rex Poloniae_ – a decade ago? Jadwiga, of the Hungarian House of Anjou, child-monarch in a country that was not her own?

Or was it her husband, the last pagan ruler in Europe? The man who had cast off his heathen idols and embraced the Christian God when he was put on the Polish throne as Władysław Jagiełło?

Whenever the royal couple appeared in public, I would join the crowd to watch them. The queen stirred something deep within my heart. Black hair and black eyes, her Hungarian accent not unlike my own, her face ageless and lily-white. Scion of one of the noblest houses of Europe and ruler of an empire that bridged the East with the West, Jadwiga had the bearing of an abbess rather than a queen. Her dress lacked all jewels and frippery. It was of a severe cut; one may even call it monastic. It did not surprise me that her subjects thought she was shrouded in divine light.

Her nature was not divine. I could have told them that. I had tasted the fragrance of divinity on my tongue, and she did not possess it. No, she, like myself, was filled with longing for something greater to lose herself in. She, like myself, a wanderer from beyond the Danube. We had Buda in common: the city where I had been educated many decades before she was born. Yet were she to look at me and _see_ me, she would behold a man barely older than herself.

The king intrigued me. Had he truly given up the gods whom he had worshipped all his life? Had he accepted the hand of the princess and the whole of the kingdom in return for ridding Europe of the monster of pagan idolatry? Had he slain the last dragon?

Jadwiga’s gaze grazed the crowd; she might have sensed my presence, for even though I knew how to make myself disappear, I knew also how to make myself visible to those whom I wished to see me. Sometimes, her eyes would stray into the shadow wherein I lurked, a fiend hidden in plain sight. His little chyortik, as Athos used to call me in those days: a feeble moniker for a creature like me.

Even after he’d seen me slaughter and devour a man, Athos had failed to understand my true nature. He thought me delightful; a spirited kitten, his charming flittermouse, when my teeth dug deep into his flesh and tore through his tendons and muscles and I swallowed his lifeforce. He didn’t know about the boiling pitch that simmered at the bottom of my soul, hidden away under the beat of my human heart, my smile and my lily-white skin.

Did two souls dwell in the king’s breast, too? I mused as I watched him, searching his face for traces of fire and thunder that lit up the forests and the sky by the northern shores of Europe. What would my Greek lover have to say about the god Perkūnas, I wondered idly, master over fire and thunderbolts, who had lived thousands of years longer than his Hellenic brother Zeus? Where had he gone, the Baltic God of Thunder, now that the Christian cross has been erected where his oak once stood? Had he ascended into heavens to look down at the people who forsook him? Or had he crawled into the shadows and roots of trees in the impenetrable Lithuanian forests? Was he biding his time till the power of the Christian God would weaken, worship worn down by the habit of centuries?

Did the king invoke Perkūnas’ name in his heart when his lips addressed _Pater noster qui es in caelis_?

The midday hour struck. In the tower of Saint Mary’s Church, the trumpeter blew the first notes of the _hejnał_ on his instrument. I watched the queen breathe in a gasp as her eyes snapped to the tower, and a smile curled in the corners of her mouth. It was an odd smile, childlike and royal at the same time, as ageless as the lily-white face. She was thinking the same as I did as we listened to the anthem of the City of Krakow, whose name had found its way into the Polish from the Hungarian language: _hajnal_ – dawn.

The midday hour was when my soul travelled back across the Danube and into the forests of my Wallachian homeland.

The midday hour was when I permitted myself to long for what I had lost.

Even as the silver thread of the last trumpet sound reverberated through the air, I knew I was being watched. I shifted my gaze to the queen and our eyes met briefly, hers as black and fathomless as the night sky above the Highlands of Dunántúl.

But it wasn’t her gaze that prickled on my skin. I turned my head. My heart dropped into the pit of my stomach and then leapt into my throat. His doublet the colour of the Aegean Sea, the brim of his hat casting a deep shadow over his brow and eyes, Athos was stood a few paces away amidst the crowd that weaved around and broke apart against him like waves against a rock. Unmoved and immovable. Firm, unyielding, eternal.

I slipped out of the shadow, and the citizen who had all but brushed against my shoulder without spotting me made a leap like a spooked horse. His angry glare struck me, his mouth opened to spit out a curse. Our eyes met, I smiled with my lips and teeth, and he shrunk back, crossing himself. I drew the sign of the cross over him in passing, if only to see him blanch and cower in confusion. Athos might have ridiculed my habit and threatened to burn it, deeming the cut unbecoming for my slender frame and the fabric too rough for my tender skin, but it continued to serve me well and I would not part with it, not even for him. In the city, it offered me better protection than my hauberk.

“Niech będzie pochwalony,” my Achaean godling greeted me in Polish, lips quirked in the sardonic smirk that made me want to tug at them with my fangs. _Laudetur Iesus Christus_.

“Na wieki wieków, amen,” I replied. _In sæcula, amen._

He made me a small bow, his eyes fixed at my face in heathen insolence. “Will you not bless _me_ , Father?”

I made the sign of the cross over his head and he straightened up, his gaze full of a challenging triumph that stirred the blood in my loins. It was moments like this that I was glad of my monastic robe, whose loose folds concealed the effect his irreverent mockery had on me. It could not conceal the blush that blossomed in my cheeks, and I saw hunger well up in Athos’ eyes. There and then, in the hustle and bustle of the town square in the midday hour, he was ready to throw me down and ravish me on the strength of my flushed countenance alone. For the span of a breath, I thought he might do just that: push me up against the wall and hitch up my habit to wrap his hand around my prick that was even then burning for him.

I lifted the cross that hung around my neck and held it between us, as if to ward off an evil demon. “Have you sinned?”

“Often.”

I held the cross to his mouth and he kissed it, his hot breath scorching my knuckles. “Before I can bless you, you will have to confess the sins you committed, in deed and thought.”

“The thought that at present torments me most,” he said, slipping from Russian, which we had been using amongst ourselves ever since we’d come to Krakow, into Greek, the language in which he had first taunted me on the field of battle and which had remained the language of our love-making. “Is whether you are wearing anything under that horse blanket. Religious garb suits you as little as religious fervour does, oh sweet diablik mine.”

Beneath my habit, my skin tautened against the soft linen of my undershirt. Behind Athos, a large merchantess was mongering geese that made an unearthly racket. Athos’ voice was like the finest velvet from Baghdad, and the hairs on my arms, neck and legs rose under its touch. It was the voice that belonged into the cloister of our shared room. Spoken, nay, _purred_ amidst a rippling crowd and under the glaring sun, its effect was devastating.

“Was it the need to have this question answered that drove you out of your den and into sunlight?” I asked, for he had spent the last week locked up in our room, waiting for the messenger to bring him the ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ from Zawisza Czarny, whose banner Athos wished to join.

In lieu of an answer, Athos reached inside his doublet and pulled out a writ which I read, greatly amused. But also touched, for I knew how much it meant to my proud paramour to penetrate the circle of nobility once again. He had confessed during one sleepless sweltering summer night, as we lay side by side, barely touching but for our entangled hands, that he had sensed himself go feral. Wallowing in the grime of battlefields, consorting with minor warlords and common soldiers for centuries, he had felt his future being blasted, his nobility defiled, his salvation compromised through the despair that came upon him in moments of quiet solitude between battles.

I had not seen him drink immoderately; not until now. Not until he had locked himself up and despatched Grigoriy to fetch him the strongest wine the cellars of Krakow had to offer.

“Congratulations, Sir Knight,” I said, handing him the letter back. Zawisza Czarny – _the Black_ , thus named for his raven hair and his black armour, embodied the knightly virtues like no other, and I rejoiced in my lover’s happiness. “I shall look forward to you practising the chivalric code. If my memory doesn’t deceive me, one of the seven duties prescribed by chivalry is composing verse to praise the beauty and virtue of your beloved.”

“I shall sing the praise of your virtue in every tongue known to man,” he replied. “With my mouth stretched around your dick.”

How we had made it back to our lodgings, I do not know. The inestimable Grigoriy, more spectre than man, had made the room presentable in our absence, and the sheets – from which the blood stains would never completely fade – smelled of lavender.

Had they smelled of manure and bilge water, it would not have deterred me. His scent overpowered me as it always did, that blend of divine essence and human ( _oh so human_ ) sweat and skin. He called me beautiful. I could not call him the same. When he lay spread out before me like he did now, with his arms and legs open wide, sweat gathering in the dips of his elbows, in the groove leading from his sternum to his navel, in the hollow of his throat, his body strong and firm like a marble statue, but unlike a statue full of life and warmth – I could not call him anything less than magnificent. That splendid body was mine to touch, to kiss, to savour. The simple act of running my nails up his flank (his stomach tautened and goosebumps prickled on his skin, raising those fine hairs that I loved to tease by ghosting my lips and my breath over them) made the marble spring to life. I was Pygmalion animating his Galatea with a kiss. He was my rock, my _Petros_ , upon which I was building my church.

His cock was hard and huge and so hot I considered it my duty to blow gently on it in an imitation of a fresh summer breeze. A tremor ran through him and one corner of his mouth, as I glanced up, curled in a smile. It was a serene kind of smile; and there was a tranquillity to his languid limbs and deep breaths such as I had not seen in weeks. He had followed me to Krakow as he had followed me to Varna, but what was a man like him, one who had known nothing but the field of battle for centuries, to do in the city? Even though I was perhaps the more impatient of us two, I was also more suited to the sedentary life that we were at present leading.

It was the prospect of having a purpose again, and that purpose being war, that had rendered him peaceful.

As I straddled his leg, I chanced to look up his body, and I can’t tell what it was: perhaps the stream of light that illumed his face and torso askance and made his skin glow; perhaps the hair that tangled in sweat-slick locks around his neck; perhaps the way his arms were thrown open, one hand clutching the sheets, the other curled around the wooden frame of the bed. It was, in short, the shape of the cross that his body made that conjured up the most peculiar memory from the recesses of my mind. When I was a boy, the sight of our Lord Jesus Christ, as he hung above our heads crucified for our sins, bare but for a loin cloth, his hair tangled, his hipbones as sharp as those that were even now digging into the palms of my hands, had roused those strange new sensations deep within my breast and my groin. In my innocence, I had taken them for religious elation.

And indeed, my desire to worship Athos was the all-consuming fire of religious devotion. Ignis sacer, nay, _ignis infernalis_ , it devastated my soul like St. Anthony’s Fire devastated its victim’s body. I gave myself over to its blaze and, my mind aflame, crouched down and licked a long path along the inside of his thigh. His blood rushed to the surface, his cock twitched, dragging a sticky smear across his stomach, and I leaned in again and licked the same spot, pressing my tongue to where the gurgle of blood was the strongest.

He rolled his head to the side and his lips parted in a sigh. “Do it,” he whispered the words that he had spoken to me that night, when I had been granted the first sip of that divine nectar. The muscles in his legs tensed and then relaxed as he gave himself over to me. With my mouth parted just above his skin, I could taste the salt of his sweat as it steamed off him in heady clouds. I licked my lips and gasped in surprise: my fangs had dropped without my notice and I cut my tongue on the tip. I could not remember the last time that had happened.

I dug my nails deep into the flesh around his hipbones to make him arch with a hiss. His thigh throbbed beneath my mouth and I parted my lips, sucked in a mouthful of skin and drilled my teeth slowly into his flesh.

“ _Aramis._ ”

Had I truly heard him speak my name? Or was it just the hiss of liquid fire that cascaded through me as his blood rushed into my mouth? I held fast onto his hips – to steady him or to steady myself, I did not know. Perhaps I was steadying us both, anchoring us to each other, because there was nothing else. We were both adrift like Icarus on his wings of wax, and like Icarus we would burn and then drown if we let go of each other.

His hand clenched around a fistful of my hair. He moaned, a deep, pained sound that tore from the depth of his lungs, in time with the beat of his heart as it was pumping his essence into my mouth, throb after throb after throb.

His heartbeat became my own, as it was wont to happen when I drank from him, when the rush of his blood was so potent that it guided mine. The fog inside my head lifted, I lay becalmed, panting into him as he spurted his lifeforce into me. Then, I slammed back into my body, for a surge of lust shot through me and I spilled myself messily over and between his legs, my cock untouched.

I cried out, I know I did, and he tugged at my hair. But even through the haze that fogged my mind, I retained enough self-control to keep my mouth clamped to his thigh, lapping at his torn and abused flesh until I felt the stream of blood dry up and the wound close, throbbing gently as it healed under my tongue.

My arms, my legs atremble, I pulled back and wiped my mouth on his leg, leaving behind dark red smudges. His stomach quivered: he was laughing shakily, cupping my face with his hand, caressing my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my mouth with his thumb.

“Aramis,” he said, and this time I was sure I heard him.

My eyes must have been unfocused and wild when I looked up at him; and then my gaze fell on his cock. Miraculously, considering how much blood I had just sucked out of him, his hardness had not abated. If possible, it had swollen even more, all but bursting with the blood that had pooled to the centre of his body. Its scent called out to me.

I dragged my teeth over my lower lip. My lungs were beginning to gasp for air again, even though my hunger had been satiated. My nostrils flared, titillated by the perfume of his mingled arousal and blood. I could not do it, I did not trust myself. I ran my tongue over the row of my teeth to check if my fangs had again extended without my notice. But no, my teeth were smooth and human.

He was watching me. I startled as our eyes met. The expression in his… a hunger that matched my own.

When he wrapped his hand around his cock, I expected to hear those words again that he so often spoke when he was giving himself to me. ‘Do it.’ But he didn’t.

“I trust you,” he whispered instead, his voice a hoarse rasp.

My heart stopped and I hid my burning face in his groin, burrowing my nose in the crease at the top of his thigh and breathing him in, gulping in one huge lungful after another. And then I turned my head and licked the full length of his cock, all the way to the tip.

Athos lifted off the mattress and spat out a stream of filth in a language so ancient that I did not understand it.

Soft and velvety as it was, the tip of his cock burned against my lips in the same way that my cross did when I kissed it. I opened my mouth and let him slide in, and his pulse throbbed on my tongue. He had fucked me with this cock. Had spent himself inside me so many times, and yet this... this. Athos, I thought. Athos, Athos, Athos. Concentrating hard on my breathing, on keeping my jaw relaxed. On not dropping my fangs by accident when the desire to taste his blood would overpower me. His hips undulated like waves against the beach, and I tasted the salt of the sea on my tongue. Truly, Poseidon, not Zeus must have sired him, for he had the ocean in his blood.

I tightened my mouth around him and sucked, and he groaned my name. I slid one hand up his body and groped for his lips, guided by the heat of his breath. I pushed my fingers into his mouth and he curled his tongue around them, sucking and licking to make my fingertips tingle. I mimicked him, sucking at him with the same vigour that he was showing me.

“Aramis!”

I knew that anguished groan: it meant his release was nigh. Articulate as my lover was, and as much as he delighted in his own eloquence, his power of speech deserted him when we lay together. The three syllables of my name became a litany, and never had I heard a more ardent prayer. An explosion in my mouth, and for one terrifying second I panicked that I had clenched my teeth around him, but it was not his blood this time that flooded my mouth. I swallowed that one as eagerly as I swallowed the other.

Despite the sweltering heat that had long turned our room into a bread oven, Athos was holding me in his arms, and with my finger I drew lazy patterns in the sweat-slick hairs on his chest. My lips were throbbing still, and my senses were full of him. The power he had over me was chilling, and for a moment I shivered.

That roused Athos from his sated stupor. He turned his head and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Mmh?” he murmured, running his hand up and down my arm. “Cold? Does chyortik miss the infernal fires of his ancestral home? Don’t worry,” he continued with his mouth in my hair. “You won’t escape hell. Not when you keep up your sinful ways.”

“Do not blaspheme, accursed heathen.” I yawned and twisted in his arms to throw my leg over his more comfortably. “Or I will have to shove a choke pear in your mouth to teach you the virtue of silence.”

“Where are you going to get a choke pear from?” He snorted. “Are you thinking of dispatching Grigoriy to fetch one? He is my minion, not yours, and his patience with you is wearing thin as it is.”

“Hm, your logic is as always unimpeachable, my crafty Sophist. I will have to think of something else to stuff in your mouth.” I shifted my hips and pressed my groin into him. “Something big enough to stretch your mouth so that no blasphemies can pour forth.”

He laughed softly and rolled his body to lie flush against me. “I believe it was your mouth that was stretched this time round,” he purred into my ear and bit into my earlobe. And, suddenly serious and very quietly: “Thank you.”

***

_Little chyortik grinning bright_  
_In the darkness of the night,_  
_What immortal hand or eye_  
_Could alight upon thy thigh?_

I do wish William Blake hadn’t plagiarized my style so _blatantly_. Well, he did what he could - translating my rude quartets from Russian into English is a feat in itself, and so I might have forgiven him. Had Aramis not eaten him on my behalf (although the stories they tell about his sudden amorous overtures to his own wife at his death hour are touching, if false).

Still, lying next to him in our small room that night in Krakow, I couldn’t help but wax poetic, if only inside my own mind. We were poised on the brink of centuries, with millennia already behind me, and yet, like some ephebe in the throes of a first youthful passion, I felt myself truly happy, in a way that time and winds should have long buffered off my soul. Somehow, he had lifted the veil of disaffection and lassitude from me, and had crawled inside. My incubus.

I am not sure now whether I consciously knew it then, but I already loved him. 

What had Hera done when she had discovered me _in flagrante_ with her daughter, the Goddess of Discord? Why, what any good mother would have done. She put a double curse upon me. The first part condemned me to forever suffer misfortunes from a woman’s touch. (Let no one say she lacked a certain sense of humor.) The second part made me immortal, with a caveat. I could only die from a broken heart. 

But you cannot break something until it has been made whole. Aramis made me whole.

And what had I made him?


	2. Chapter 2

**Krakow, Poland - 1394**

Aramis’ mouth sucked on my tongue and then I watched as his own tongue curled inside his mouth as if he had attempted to preserve the flavor of me for later use. “Hm,” he droned out pensively, “Enjoy your day.” And then he turned back to one of his enumerable manuscripts that seemed to multiply exponentially each time he’d go out.

For the first time since we’d met, I walked out the door with purpose not of demonic provenance.

_Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches and thou shalt observe all its directions._

Such is the first tenet of the Chivalric Code. I remembered the last time I had gone to Church - it was to retrieve _him_ \- and I had knelt there and felt a kind of a religious fervor. Was that the Church they meant? Or was it the Pantheon of my own Gods in whose existence I did not have to believe because I have known and tasted them intimately?

_Thou shalt defend the Church._

The second tenet, similar to the first, called upon my affections to this edifice built upon lies and stolen idols. The Catholic Church, to this day my favorite of the branches of Christianity, knew very well how to buy the people’s love by appropriating their customs. You want a God for everything? Well, here’s a Saint for everything! You want your sacrifice and libations? Enjoy the Eucharist! You want to keep the timing of your pagan holidays? Just substitute one Godling’s name for another, erect your phallic object of choice, _et voilà_ \- Christmas! I have it on good authority that Jesus had been born in July, but Aramis and I don’t speak of such things.

This, most pagan of Christian churches, was the one I was to defend then under Zawisza Czarny. Which was ironic, because Poland at the time, by virtue of being married to Lithuania, was on the brink of constant war with the Teutonic Order, whose ostensible mission was also to defend the Church. Inexplicable in light of their constant assaults on Poland and her newly baptised monarch.

Still, I was willing to overlook the first two tenets in favor of the rest of them, which I did not find objectionable. And, should I happen to forget what my duties were, they were emblazoned above the fireplace in Zawisza’s banquet room.

_Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them._

I did not, in principle, have a problem with this, not being of Spartan provenance. Leonidas might have disagreed. _Thou shalt toss weakness off a cliff_ , would have been his credo. In Zawisza’s time, I believe this tenet mostly implied we were supposed to help ladies of high birth alight from the carriage and make sure no one dared to peek beneath their skirts.

_Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast born._

Hellas, such as she was, I loved her still. The island I had been born to, whatever you choose to call it, Kalliste, Thira, Santorini, spat out into the Aegean by a volcano and likely to disappear one day by those same means, I had not been back to in longer than even my elephant’s memory could hold.

 _Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy._ Not a problem.

 _Thou shalt make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy._ Poor infidel. I pitied him.

_Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God._

A loophole? I frowned in gathering confusion. I hoped there wasn’t going to be some kind of a test on any of this later. I felt a presence behind me and then a strong hand was upon my shoulder.

“I’m certain you do not need a refresher of the knightly virtues, my friend,” Zawisza spoke. “And I am an excellent judge of character.”

I bowed. He was a good man, nay, a Godly man. His goodliness came off him in waves just as diabolical enchantment came off my beloved in layers, sloughing off him, like a serpent's skin, as he walked through the world. I had to tear my thoughts away from Aramis and focus them on the man before me, who in his knightly kindness had granted me a reason to no longer idle through this life, for the time being.

“Remind me, Athos,” he spoke again, my name pronounced with the Slavonik cadence, a staccato beaten off the tongue, “Where did you come to Krakow from?”

_Thou shalt never lie, and shalt remain faithful to thy pledged word._

“Varna, my Lord. But it has been a rather long journey.”

“It shows in your eyes,” he said kindly and handed me a cup full of mead. I brought it to my lips in toast of him, and awaited my orders for the day.

_Thou shalt be generous, and give largesse to everyone._

Zawisza’s largesse knew no bounds. It was imperative, so that I could be of political use to him, that I acquaint myself quickly with everyone who was anyone in Krakow. It had been some time since I’ve had to practice social niceties, and was surprised to discover that my manners hadn’t completely atrophied in the wilderness of Wallachia. I spent several days in the company of my fellow knights, filling my head with Polish heraldry and historical lineages. As luck would have it, most of this learning happened to coincide with copious drinking. There was nothing in the Chivalric Code about moderation.

Walking down the cobble stoned street with my new companions, we passed by a small church and I noticed, by the weather vane of my loins, a figure in a cowl emerging from the side entrance. He may have been wearing his potato sack, but that did not stop my pulse from quickening in my veins upon beholding him.

_Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil._

The last tenet on the list flashed through my mind as our eyes met and I suddenly became hotly aware of another man’s hand on my shoulder. Aramis’ dark eyes dropped to it and then darted away as we walked on towards each other. I gave him a barely perceptible nod which he acknowledged with one of his demonic half-smirks and then he was gone, as if he had never been there in the first place.

What _was_ Good and Evil? I had no more understanding of such things. Was I ever Good? Had Aramis been the face of Evil? Zawisza trusted me to uphold the honor of his name, to live by the knightly code, but each night I returned, drunk yet happy, to tumble into the bed I shared with a Wallachian revenant and fell asleep in his arms while he drank my blood with the same fervor with which others pressed their lips to the crucifix.

I was still lost in contemplations of this when I was reminded that I was, in fact, not alone. “Athos is in love!” one of my companions joked, as our cups were refilled. I vaguely noted the din of the tavern, into which we entered.

I shook my head but did not deny it.

“Athos cannot be in love. He has no heart,” another man prodded my foot beneath the table. “How else would you explain the way he demolished me in cards the other day?” His name had been Mariusz, I had recalled, and he liked to prove the virility implicit in his name by constantly challenging those around him to various kinds of combat.

Raucous laughter rose from our table to permeate the tavern.

“Like Koshchey the Deathless?” someone else asked.

“Koshchey the Deathless doesn’t have a soul,” I corrected. “That’s the secret to his immortality.”

“And what’s yours then?” Mariusz pressed me. I briefly considered taking him home with me, as a snack for Aramis.

“You’re wrong, my friend,” I replied instead, keeping my tone as light and jovial as I could. “I do have a heart. And a soul.”

“And a mistress?” It was the man who had originally accused me of being in love. A young knight from Stary Garbów, Zawisza’s own hometown, Sławko followed his liege around the same way that a newborn puppy would follow his master. He was painfully romantic, and almost pitiful in his sincerity.

But his question had forced me to think on my feet. After all, a knight wasn’t supposed to lie. But I couldn’t very well tell them the truth, not if I wanted to continue to enjoy their polite Christian company.

“There is someone… that I’m quite taken with,” I finally spoke, quickly bringing my cup to my lips to buy more time to come up with a plausible cover story.

“And what attempts have you made at wooing this mysterious lady?” Mariusz inquired rather tactlessly. I fixed him with my gaze, wondering whether Aramis would enjoy the taste of his blood. Did simpletons taste more or less salty than men of acumen?

Then I remembered what Aramis had said about praising one’s beloved in odes. I had to improvise, so I immediately recited the following quartet.

 _Delilah my beloved_  
_As smart as she is stunning_  
_As prone to pray as kill you_  
_Her hand so white and charming._

It sounded much better in Old Slavic, and I’m happy to recreate it for you here, to the extent your modern keyboards allow. You’ll have to excuse the use of the modern Russian alphabet, but contrary to some beliefs, I am not a magician.

 _Любовница моя Далила / Lyobovnitsa moya Dalila_  
_Так же умна как и красива / Tak zhe umna kak i krasiva_  
_Её рука бела и мила / Yeyo ruka byela i mila_  
_Так же убьёт как и молила. / Tak zhe yb’yot kak i molila._

I made a courtly bow in response to their rowdy applause and made a point of writing it down so that I could share it with my Delilah upon my return.

“Oh, Athos, you better guard your locks while you sleep!” another man prodded me. I laughed louder than anyone else at that.

Aramis was still working when I tumbled back into our rooms. Grigoriy took his time dismantling me of my knightly accoutrements, while my chyortik refused to lift his eyes away from whatever he had been angrily scribbling at his desk. I could tell by the way his quill shot about sharply and the way he stabbed at the very core of the inkwell that he had been in one of his moods.

“Sir Knight,” he finally said, when my familiar departed for the night, leaving us alone at last.

 _My love_. I almost said it aloud but something stopped me, as it always did.

“You didn’t have to wait up,” I finally said.

“I can’t sleep without you,” he replied, a bitter statement underlied by surprising tenderness. I felt a swelling inside my own heart that I attempted once again to push down. I walked up to him, letting my hand rest casually atop his shoulder. He felt colder than usual. It had struck me, with no small amount of shame, that he probably hadn’t fed in overly long.

“I shouldn’t have stayed out so late,” I said, pulling a small piece of paper out of my vestments and handing it to him. “In my defense, I composed poetry in praise of your beauty. Forgive me?”

He tried to suppress the smile on his face, but failed, one corner of his mouth twitching upwards as his eyes lit up.

“It’s lovely, but… Who is this Delilah bint?”

I reached across the desk and squeezed his hand in reply as we both laughed.

“Next time, try not to make me sound _quite_ so womanly?” He rose from his chair and pressed up against me. Through the haze of the wine, I still could clearly map out the hard planes of his body against my own.

“I can’t promise that,” I whispered against his lips. “I have an audience now.”

“I noticed,” he replied curtly.

For the first time, it had occurred to me that perhaps there was more to his pique than just a fit of unfounded jealousy. Was my absence making him unhappy? And, if so, would he be unhappy enough to leave me? After all, other than my blood, I had not been able to discern what, if anything, Aramis truly needed from me.

I pulled away from him and positioned us in such a way that the candle light was casting a shadow on only half his face, while illuminating the other in a preternatural glow. He had told me he had two souls, unlike Koshchey the Deathless who had none. Did either of those souls actually care whether I was in his life, such as it was?

I had always told him that he couldn’t kill me, yet now I sensed very clearly that I had been gravely mistaken.

I felt a sudden stab at my insides, as if a ravening crow had set its talons into my gut. I loved him. I was _in love_ with him. And he could… He could… I faltered, one hand gripping at the table. My vision blurred and darkened. Was it the Eumenides inside my mind, or Hera’s laughter, I knew not, only a sudden deathlike grip caught me in a vise and squeezed. I felt as if all my life force had suddenly quit me and I collapsed to the floor at his feet.

When I came to, it was in our bed and my head had been resting in his lap, his long, beautiful fingers combing through my hair.

“Goodness,” he grinned down at me, “You Greek demi-divinities have such weak constitution, I should really never leave you to your own devices. How much did you drink?”

“Too much,” I responded too quickly. It was better to let him think that was why I had swooned. His fingers pressed into my temples and I shut my eyes against the onslaught of unwanted thoughts.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t died before. You exist for over three thousand years, you’re likely to have your heart broken a few times. Still, it wasn’t death I feared. I suddenly couldn’t imagine anything more devastating than losing Aramis. By comparison, my other entanglements had seemed pure trifles. In the past, I would have run before I got in too deep. They can’t break your heart if you do it first, after all.

“What is the matter with you?” his melodious voice washed over my creased brow. “You’ll grind your teeth into stumps.” His fingers pressed into the tightened muscles of my jaw and I had to force myself to unclench, though I still could not bring myself to speak.

But running wouldn’t save me now.

***

His drunken slumber was restless. He appeared to sleep in short bursts that were interspersed with fitful tossing and turning and with curses spat out in his mother tongue. Or it may have been his father’s tongue, for try as I might I could not discern any words that resembled the Greek that we both spoke. Was it the ancient language of the Gods in which he dreamed? Did Morpheus come upon him when he slept to abduct him into an era long gone?

I did not wish to wake him, for I knew that he had to rest. At the same time, I was grateful that his restlessness kept me awake: ironically (for never let it be said that Lady Fate had no sense of humour), the more I required sleep, the less I wished to give myself over to it.

Athos' blood had been sustaining me ever since we’d met, eradicating the need for sleep and food. All of a sudden, I found myself bereft of that nourishment. Now that he had duties to perform that required him to employ his physical and mental faculties, I could no longer, with a clean conscience, take his lifeforce in such immoderate amounts as I'd grown accustomed to.

Draining him of blood would not kill him, as he had told me. He had shown me, too, for I would never forget that terrifying moment when I lifted my mouth off his thigh one night and found him quite lifeless. In my panic, I threw myself over him and was about to slash open my own veins above his mouth to feed him as he had fed me (a foolish measure, I knew, for the blood he imbibed would not replenish his veins). His eyelids flickered and the white lips moved. He whispered my name with what seemed his last breath. "What do I do, tell me!" I gritted out between teeth clenched tight by fear. His body cold and pale like a marble statue, he shook his head feebly. His hand twitched against my thigh.

"Stay."

That was the last he spoke for many hours. I stretched out against him, simultaneously trying to cover and warm him with my body and to not smother him, to leave him room to breathe and heal. He slept through the night and day, and I rested by his side. Gorged on his blood, my body thrummed with energy, yet the flow of my own blood was guided by his weak heartbeat. It was a most peculiar sensation, and I drifted in a haze, asleep and not asleep, aware and not aware, and never sure if the things I saw were real or if they were mirages conjured up by my feverish brain.

In the evening, he was back among the living. His brow had not yet lost its deathly pallor, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. "I told you you can’t kill me, _zveryushka_." The first words he had spoken after endless hours of silence, and they made me want to kiss him and kill him in equal measure. I settled for a third option and held the flagon with wine to his lips, for they were parchment-dry and I knew must hurt.

"I am never going to do that again," I vowed. He smirked with one corner of his mouth, and I leaned in to lick that infuriating superciliousness off his face.

I would certainly not do it now. Not when Athos spent his days practising the arts of the sword and exercising his archery skills with the masters-at-arms at Wawel Castle. The Polish nation was in a continuous warlike state. I sensed it everywhere. It thrummed through me like a pagan drum. Athos thought I was jealous of his newfound companions. (And perhaps I was, but that was of secondary consideration; I could always dispose of any undesirable individual who strayed too far into the territory that I had marked as mine.)

It was not jealousy that made me restless and unhappy. No, it was the 6th of the Deadly Sins. I was envious of Athos’ good fortune. I, too, was a warrior. I, too, was a nobleman. Why should I have to skulk in the shadows and slaughter like a savage when there was such ecstatic joy to be had wielding one's sword on the field of battle? I had always found the battlefield the most inexhaustible and diverting source of sustenance and pleasure.

You may wonder why. Why, if I was able to survive on mortal food, I drained men of blood. Why I didn’t repent my sins, cloister myself off in a monastery and stop inflicting the demon that lived in my breast on humankind.

I had been dead once. Felled by the stroke of a sword that cleaved my skull. For thus was the nature of my unholy powers: I could be killed if metal pierced my head. I believed, having read as many accounts and treatises on the subject as I could find, I would remain dead forever if the metal stayed in my skull. If it was removed... that was a different matter altogether.

I had been dead and buried in hallowed ground. For how long, I do not know. I had not existed then, except as the mortal shell that rotted in the earth.

And then – a sudden pinprick of light. Like a candle flickering to life only to be extinguished by a gust of wind. A quick flash, and it was gone, leaving agony in its wake. My consciousness had been aroused, albeit briefly, and I felt myself rot, felt my skin peel back from my bones, felt my liquefying flesh teem with maggots. It could not have been longer than a blink of an eye (not my eye, for my eyes had been long gone, their soft tissue the first part of my body devoured by worms), yet the pain was eternal.

The next time the light flashed through me, like a red-hot blade slicing through muscles and bone, I cried out in agony. I had neither tongue nor lips, nor any breath in my lungs, and my silent howl reverberated in my hollow skull like echo in a cave.

Succumbed to timeless torture, I languished in my earthy purgatory, until one day the flash of light lingered on, like a lonely flame nurtured into fire. Burning pain shot through me, obscuring my thoughts, but the blaze of light was stronger. I realised, I do not know how, that I could feed. My funeral shroud, my own flesh, if I devoured them, I would… I would… No, that could not be right.

But there was _something_ there, something that fed me, that sustained me and made me grow strong. It wasn’t until a long time later that I learned that creatures like myself could feed from inside the grave, sucking life out of the living who were foolish enough to come close to us. Somebody had begun to visit my grave – the priest in whose graveyard I was buried perhaps? A brother-in-arms who had survived the battle? A village maiden leaving flowers on the grave of an unnamed soldier?

I settled for the latter. The notion that a nubile young woman had taken a fancy to what I imagined was a solitary grave occupied me quite pleasantly (for as I regained control over my faculties, I sought to disperse loneliness and lassitude by exercising my imagination and wit). As I grew stronger, the pain grew less, and there came a time when I spread my wings, extended my talons, sharpened my nails and clawed through the soil. Cold air hit my skin and I hissed. Cold air hit my lungs and I coughed. I was alive, I knew not how, and the night sky above me dazed me with the light of a thousand stars.

I shielded my eyes from their glare and fixed my gaze downwards, on the earth that had served as my home for – how long? I did not know; it could have been days, it could have been years. Decades, perhaps. But back in those days, I could not imagine my existence to last for decades. I had not yet been twenty when I had first died.

A fresh grave caught my eye. I saw it as clearly as if in broad daylight. I went down on my knees, bent my head and pressed the cross that hung around my neck to my lips. “Requiescat in pace,” I whispered, crossed myself and stood.

I never wanted to know oblivion again.

After the first night I’d slept by his side, I woke to Athos lying perfectly still. He was barely breathing, yet the pounding of his heart was deafening. When he felt me come up from my slumber, his eyes lit up with radiant joy. “Good morning,” he whispered with a sweet smile, such as I’d never yet seen grace his features. “I didn’t know you needed… I didn’t know you slept.”

“Only-” _when I’m safe_ “occasionally.” I yawned, stretched and rolled into him, rubbing my face against his chest. “And when the blood I drink is such an inferior vintage that it doesn’t suffice to sustain me.”

He laughed; a low, delighted laugh that sent vibrations through my skin and soul. I made love to him that morning without drinking from him. I was drinking him in instead: the brush of the hairs on his arm under my fingertips as I wrapped my hand around his wrist; the whisper of his breath against my neck; the slide of skin on skin as his legs moved between and around mine; the rise and fall of his chest under my palm and lips; the dark glow in his eyes that remained glued to my face even when his climax rolled over him.

“Beautiful,” he sighed, watching me move to the same rhythm that guided his hips.

And I was. I was beautiful in those days, the lustre of my hair and eyes dazzled the eye like finest ebony, and my milky-white skin glowed like snow touched by the light of stars. He used to tease me, call me vain when he saw me tend to my hair and hands with perfumes and oils. He did not know what it meant to have skin that flaked off one’s flesh; to have flesh that putrefied around one’s bones. To seek the oblivion of sleep, only to fall into the embrace of death.

Did I scream? I don’t believe I did. I surfaced from the grave that existed only in my memory, clawing my way back into consciousness with the determined desperation of a drowning man. Athos held me in his arms and mouthed words into my skin that I did not understand. His lips at my temple, his warmth, the weight of his body, they were solid and real. I clung to him like a man at sea tossed around by waves would cling to a rock.

“I confess, I have little fancy for sleep,” I muttered, forcing my tongue to form words around the soil that clogged my mouth. No. Not soil, there was no soil, my tongue was wooden and dry and I coughed, gasping for air as bone-crushing terror descended upon me.

A warm hand cupped my face and the sweet taste of wine against my lips jolted me back to my senses. I wasn’t dead, I lived. Athos was holding me, and his heartbeat guided mine. The harsh, painful throb thundered through my chest at the speed of a galloping horse. It hurt, but it was the pain of life, not that of death. It abated under the touch of his hands and his mouth.

“You don’t have to sleep,” he said, his voice dark and low, vibration rather than sound. “If you don’t want to. You can drink my blood, if it helps you stay awake.”

I coughed again and turned in his arms, pressing up against him with the full length of my back. His hand was splayed on my chest; I lifted it to my lips and kissed his palm. “I know.”

His mouth at the nape of my neck, brushing my hair aside, and his lips alighted on my skin, sending a shiver all the way down my spine. My skin tautened and shuddered around me, and I ran my hands down my arms, torso and legs, feeling for cracks. Feeling for scales. Athos wrapped his fingers around my wrist and gently motioned my hand back up. He threaded his fingers through mine in front of my chest.

“I’ll stay awake with you,” he said, and I smiled.

“No you won’t.” As my body relaxed into his, my muscles barely shivered and my limbs grew heavy by degrees. I sank back into darkness. The darkness of the grave, not the darkness of the night: deep and impenetrable, it muffled sensation and sound. “I dread to imagine the mood insomnia would put you in.”

“Not insomnia.” He was stroking my hair with tender fingers. “A vigil. Every knight is supposed to hold a vigil-”

“Yes, before the accolade. You, Athos of Thebes, have been knighted already. And don’t forget,” I pinched the flesh between his finger and thumb, “a knight is also expected to fast and to take a cleansing bath before his vigil. If I’m not mistaken, you went on a veritable binge with your new companions. And as for a bath-” I turned my head and sniffed in an exaggerated fashion at his shoulder.

Athos laughed. “Fie! Hush, oh shrewd spawn of Satan.” His warm lips brushed across my neck and he threw a leg over mine. “Would you like to drink?” he asked quietly as I settled into the nest that he’d built around me.

I did not. I did not drink from him that night. Nor any other night when I gasped awake, hag-ridden and sweat-soaked. The dreams – for I refused to call them memories – were not quite paralysing enough to make me reconsider his offer. He had a greater need of his blood than I did.

He was not the only vessel I could drink from.

The decision was, as one may say, organic. I did not arrive at it through conscious deliberation; rather, it unfurled like a sapling, like a mushroom after rain. I was sat at my desk, illuminating a manuscript for the Chair of Astronomy and transforming the playful phalli drawn in the margins by Athos’ hand into the head of Medusa in the constellation of Perseus. Even as my hand steered the quill, the idea blossomed fully-formed in my mind. I knew by the tingle of my loins that it was the right one. I dropped the quill to the floor for Grigoriy to pick up and dispose of, stoppered my ink bottle and rose to my feet. There was a man whom I had to see on urgent business; a very nice man, one who smiled at me in a familiar manner and who never flinched when I smiled back, flashing my teeth at him.

 

 

 

***

“I hear he’s from Bohemia.”

“No, I think it’s Mavrovlachia.”

“Isn’t it Hungary?”

“He didn’t sound Magyar when I met him.”

“Maybe he’s Bulgarian.”

“Athos is Bulgarian.”

“No, he’s not!”

Upon hearing my name, I pricked up my ears towards the gossipers by Zawisza’s fireplace. My host, seeing me thusly distracted, cleared his throat.

“Don’t mind them. Wallachia, Bulgaria - it’s all the same to my knights. They aren’t quite as well-traveled as you are.”

“Were we speaking of Wallachia?” I couldn’t help but ask, feeling my heart speed up. I had taken great pains to hide my voivodship from Zawisza. I had fought against Mircea and, at least for the time being, he was an ally of Poland.

“They’re talking about a new recruit of mine. You will meet him today - he is to present himself here.”

“And this new recruit is? Bohemian?” Again, I tried to sound as unmoved as possible, but a strange pounding in my temples told me I was in danger.

“Wallachian, actually.”

I took a long gulp from the cup I had been holding. Terrific. And just when I was finally settling into some semblance of normalcy, my cover was going to be blown. Why couldn’t these _chertoviye_ Wallachians stay in _Wallachia_?

“And here he comes now.” Zawisza’s hand was at my elbow. “Come, Athos! Let me introduce you to your new comrade-in-arms.”

I turned, or rather, I allowed him to turn me, my legs leaden with a strange foreboding, towards the entryway. For a few moments, I thought I had completely lost my mind.

“Aνάθεμα,” I swore under my breath.

Before me stood a young knight, clad in the finest, most elegant warrior’s attire that one could truly afford at the waning of the fourteenth century in Krakow. But despite the finely crafted breast plate, the ornately embossed leather, the strangely emerald gleams of verdant material that lined his cloak and lent him the air of a wood-sprite, yes, despite all that, and the sizable sword he had worn strapped to the brass-encrusted leather belt of his knighthood around his hips, it was none other than my _chertyonok_.

He made a reverent bow towards Zawisza, his eyes never meeting mine. As he did so, I noticed the fine, bead-garnished netting around his lustrous, raven hair.

“Rise, Sir Renatus!” Zawisza, in all his knightly benevolence, greeted his newcomer warmly. I smiled at the name the sly fox had chosen for himself. “Rise and let me introduce you to my other knights.”

“Gladly,” he spoke and finally turned his face in my direction, beaming at me like the Virgin Madonna he most definitely was not.

“Athos of Thebes, this is Renatus of Snagov,” Zawisza did as promised, introducing me to my lover.

“I am honored, Sir Knight,” Aramis greeted me with a short bow of the head.

“As am I,” I finally squeezed through my teeth.

“Athos,” he spoke, voice light and even, “What an unusual name!”

“It’s Greek,” I replied curtly, my eyes burning a hole right into his infuriatingly smug and beautiful face.

“Short for Athanasios, no doubt,” he continued, his tone jovial.

“Hardly,” I replied, grinding my teeth in fury. Athanasios - it meant ‘immortal.’

If Zawisza noticed any of the strain on my behalf, he did not let on, guiding Aramis onwards to introduce him to the others and leaving me to press my nails into the palms of my hands until they threatened to bleed.

He was… he looked… Oh _Gods_. How was I supposed to control myself when he was here? And looking like _that_? I was certain that my face had flushed seven different shades of crimson as I tried to get control of myself.

“Well, that’s everyone then,” I heard Zawisza’s voice. “We shall have to find someone to show you around the grounds, and then you can join us for a repast.”

“I’ll do it,” I heard myself say as if from afar.

“How kind of you, Sir,” he flashed me one of his predatory smiles that I recognized only too well. He was enjoying himself, the bastard!

I made a rather courtly gesture towards him, inviting him silently to come with me on what was promising to be a charming little promenade. We walked together in silence for some time, neither one of us making any indication towards speech.

“This is the courtyard,” I said, pointing out the courtyard.

He raised his eyebrow at me. “You don’t say.”

I have had enough of this charade and pulled him with me into the stables, slamming him against the nearest post.

“How?!” I hissed.

“Really? _That’s_ what you’d like to know? _How_? Not why?”

“I know _why_!” I snapped. That had caught him off his guard, I could tell. “You couldn’t bear to let me have this because you’re a jealous beast, a green-eyed monster, yes! The color you have so adroitly chosen for your outfit!”

“I thought green was rather becoming on me.” He smiled, the little demon, and I pressed him harder against the post, our groins slamming together as I did so.

“What are you doing here, Aramis?”

“Keeping an eye on you. As you said.”

“Because you’re afraid I might take a fancy to some other knight?”

“Because, you outrageous ass, you passed out in my arms the other night. Clearly, you cannot be left without adult supervision!”

“Nonsense!” I fumed. Although, he had a point - it looked bad. And it had been my own fault for not telling him the truth. But how would one even begin to tell the truth about such a thing? The Chivalric Code be damned!

“And as for _how_ , well, let’s just say I have a way of making men do the things I am inclined to have them do.”

“Black Wallachian magic?”

“You can call it whatever you like.”

His body was tight as a string against mine. I wasn’t even sure why I had been so consumed with rage. Was it that he hadn’t trusted me? Or the fact that he had no right showing up at my place of work looking the way he looked? Good enough to eat. Good enough to tear apart with my teeth.

“Is that what you do to me? Make me do whatever you want?” My breath was becoming labored, pressed up against him, our lips almost touching, but not quite. His mouth fell open and I saw his sharp, pink, little tongue dart out against the pearly whiteness of his teeth.

“I’ve never made you do anything you didn’t want to do,” he replied, seemingly unmoved.

“You could have just told me what you were planning,” I exhaled against his lips.

“I could have. But where’s the amusement in that?” I felt his fingers on the nape of my neck, playing me like the harp. “You interrupted our tour, Sir.”

“This is the stable,” I said and pressed my mouth against his, capturing his moan of desire onto my tongue.

He laughed then, a little triumphant laugh that sent a shiver down my spine. It was perfectly fine for him to laugh, he wasn’t the one who was so head over heels as to feel the very breath of Thanatos at his back. I bit that mocking mouth of his then and he moaned again, arching his back, arching into me so that my arms could snugly sneak around his waist to press him even closer. His breastplate collided with mine, somehow making my lust-rage boil over. I couldn’t keep my hands off him in a cassock, what made him think I would be able to stand the sight of him resplendent in his armor?

My mouth latched onto the ligaments of his neck, straining against my lips the way my own must palpitate when he’s about to drink from me. I couldn’t mark him the way I wanted to, not now, not when he had given himself to Zawisza the same way I had. But I could blaze a trail of hot, angry kisses down the exposed column of his neck until I reached the clasp of his cloak. I tore at it with my teeth, the clasp flying to the ground as the cloak fell into the hay.

“Hey! I bedeviled a very nice man for that!” he protested with an overabundance of amusement in his voice.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” I whispered hotly as my teeth latched on to the straps of his breastplate and I pulled on them until they loosened and it too came clattering between our feet. I kicked it away.

“A new one? What are you now - King Midas?”

“We shall see if your prick turns to gold at my touch,” I suggested continuing my feral assault against his clothes. I didn’t have the patience of a saint, so I sent his belt tumbling to the ground and pulled at his breeches with my hand while my teeth continued to tear at his shirt. The sound of it ripping gave me untold satisfaction and I growled as I latched my teeth to his exposed nipple.

He swore in the dialect of his youth that I only ever heard him use when the heat of desire clouded his brilliant mind. My hand had at last found my quarry and wrapped around his scalding, tumescent cock. He pulsated with life under my touch and I suspected that he had stopped somewhere for a repast of his own before presenting himself to Zawisza’s retinue. I used my tongue to flick at the little nub hardening inside my mouth, tearing another whimper from him, followed by a curse. I pulled at it with my teeth as my hand tugged at the heated flesh of his prick.

“Athos!” he finally exclaimed as his fingers dug into my hair. His hand was hesitant, unsure of whether to press my face closer or pull me off of his abused nipple. Could I make him come apart like this? Just like this? It was a titillating challenge, one that I relished taking on, so I moved on to his other nipple, giving it the same treatment as the one I started with. “God _damn_!” He arched off the wooden post into my mouth and I had remembered that had been the more sensitive one.

“A knight doesn’t blaspheme,” I taunted him pulling off his nipple, but only long enough to give him my most diabolical smile.

“I hate you,” he gasped, fingers tangling in my hair again, attempting to pull me closer. Closer, but not quite close enough. I hovered just a breath away from his flushed skin and blew against the moist and throbbing nob. “Jesus!”

“Tsk tsk,” I shook my head. I congratulated myself silently on having this exceptionally great idea in the first place and reattached my mouth to the nipple I had just let go. His whimpers were becoming more pathetic and I became very aware that he was riding the very edge of his desire. I pressed the thenar muscles of my palm against the base of his cock and pressed, holding him right on that edge.

“Please,” he begged me, his brow covered in a thin sheen of perspiration.

“Not yet,” I said, letting my tongue roam over the planes of his abdomen, dipping into the hidden pocket of his navel.

“If this is meant to be punishment, you’re going about it wrong,” he half-grinned half-whined from above me, his head rolling against the post I had pressed him into.

“We shall see,” I replied and swept him up into my arms, but only so I could flip him around and press his chest into the post. He cursed again, legs tangled hopelessly in his dropped breeches. I picked up his discarded belt and used it to bind his arms to the post in front of him.

“We hardly have time for this,” he pointed out, without truly protesting.

“Leave it to me to make the excuses,” I suggested, running my fingers over the contours of his exposed ass now that I had him secured. It was symbolic, and I was aware of it, he could easily liberate himself if he had truly wanted to. Instead, he remained still and tossed his head back, letting it fall against me. I bit into the back of his neck, gently so as not to leave a mark there, loving the way his body shuddered and soft moans of desire escaped his delicate and coral lips. “Aramis,” I said, losing all eloquence when I was no longer the master of my own passion, and buried my own throbbing prick in between his thighs.

“Athos, for God’s sake!”

I laughed into the back of his neck as my fingers toyed with his reddened nipples while I fucked into the soft heat of his thighs.

“Yes, my _chyortik_? What do you want?”

“Something. Anything!”

I squeezed my fingers tighter and he moaned into the post again.

“Do you want my hand?”

“Please!”

He begged so nicely. I had no idea that I had wanted to hear him beg. Yet, why did it surprise me? I had always wanted him in my thrall as much as I had been in his. In truth, I couldn’t hold myself back very much longer, as I thrust right underneath that puckering orifice that I loved lavishing with so much attention.

“Please,” he begged again, more quietly. I could feel the tension of his body about to explode, either violently or passionately, or both. I spat into my hand and pressed it against the length of his dripping cock, stroking it in time with my own thrusts. I held him tightly against me as I felt his body finally give way to the explosion he had been valiantly staving off. And then I shut my eyes and spent myself between his thighs, with my lips pressed to the skin behind his earlobe.

For a minute that might have been an hour, we clung to each other limply, until at last he stirred and twisted his hands out of the loose knot that held him in place.

“And how do you expect me to show up before Zawisza now?” he asked, his eyes shimmering with the embers of an extinguished flame. “Or was this your evil plan all along?”

“Just pull your trousers back on. You’ll survive.”

“With your seed dripping down my legs for the rest of the day?”

The only reply I gave him was a tiny shrug.

“I see,” he smiled and pulled up his breeches. “But you’ll pay for this.”

“Your empty threats are duly noted,” I said. “Now, would you like me to show you the courtyard again?”

 

 

 

***

As knights under Zawisza’s banner, we were making ready for war. The prospect did not disconcert us. War was all that Athos had ever known; war was where I had tasted some of the greatest pleasures of my life. No, it was peace that posed the greatest challenge for a soldier. In times of peace, knights would idle and languish; they would forget their duties and turn to dubious, even blasphemous pleasures.

None of this applied to Zawisza of Garbów, a paragon of chivalric virtues in times of peace as much as in times of war. It was plain to see why Athos was drawn to him: there was nothing my proud godling loved more than honour and nobility of manner. (I did wonder sometimes if he had stayed with me, had I not been of noble birth myself – for he had called me a peasant when we first clashed swords on the battlefield and I’d never forgotten the sting of the insult.)

Fortunately, those were not peaceful times. Following the marriage between Poland and Lithuania, both countries were joined in a Commonwealth that promised peace and prosperity. The Teutonic Knights, however – oh, they were quite a different matter. Ostensibly devoted to converting the last heathens of Europe to Christianity, those pugnacious crusaders had established a fortress in the country that the Polish Crown had considered hers, and they were determined to expand their territory.

Zawisza Czarny was diplomat as much as soldier. It was on his orders that Athos and I had been despatched to Marienburg Castle, the seat of the Teutonic Knights. The journey took us through Masuria, a region inhabited by a warlike people (but then – which people were not warlike in those lands and days?), whose rapacious disposition matched that of their blood-thirsty neighbour, the Teutonic Knights. Even in times of the greatest peace, that was a region of continuous pillage, conflagration and invasion. The lands were overgrown with immense forests; marshes formed around greater and smaller lakes, partly grown over with dense thickets and partly open in the form of meadows. In those woods and morasses, wild beasts of every kind found commodious refuge; and in the deepest forest gloom lived in countless multitudes the bearded aurochs, bears, wild boars, and near them wolves, lynxes, martens, deer, and wild goats. In the swamps and arms of rivers beavers built their dams. In the wilderness, ghosts and demons rose up at night. The Masurians, sitting around their fires, told marvellous tales of what took place in those forest depths, from which issued the howling of unknown beasts, cries half human, half brute.

It was, in short, a country that made my soul sing.

As we rode along a path that meandered through quaggy marshes, overgrown with duckweed and of bottomless depth, the air vibrated with the hungry wrath of people who dwelled, half-man, half-beast, in a state of continuous war. Did they take us for their Teutonic foe? I do not know. All I know is that when they charged, it was the vicious attack of dumb beasts, not that of a human adversary. I had drawn my sword even before the first enemy emerged from the wall of green. My Frisian cuirass would not protect me from the axe, and I was glad that I had decided to carry my shield myself – unlike my Hellenic idol, who had handed his over to Grigoriy for the sake of comfort.

Athos was perched in his high saddle like a monarch on his throne. His gigantic stallion was like a fortress, he surely fancied, because his sword remained sheathed and he appeared to find the skirmish tedious. If an assailant turned at him, he whipped him with his flagrum which, as he claimed, he had treasured as a memento of his Roman days and occasionally used for thrashing Grigoriy. If an attacker proved stubborn, Athos charged at him with his horse, under whose mighty hooves I saw one or two men disappear. Athos’ expression of phlegmatic serenity did not change.

I have to admit, however, that I didn’t pay much attention to his countenance. The odour of blood rose around us and settled in a thick layer on my tongue. My sword cleaved the head of one man, and I jerked it out only to ram it into the chest of another. My mouth smiled, baring my teeth at the enemy, who realised too late their grave mistake. One quarry escaped me, slipping under the arc that my sword described over his head, and his axe slammed into the leather of Athos’ saddle-bag, barely a hand’s breadth away from Athos’ thigh. The man’s neck spouted a fountain of blood as I’d wheeled my steed around and used its momentum in addition to my own strength to sever the man’s head from his body in one fell swoop. Athos sent me a smile over the body of the dead man that enraged and aroused me equally. My loins tightened with fury at the sight of his calm gaze and his curling mouth. The attackers were despatched. I leapt off my horse, sank down by the gurgling, gasping body of a man who had not yet expired his last breath and rammed my fangs into his throat. His fury mingled with mine as I sucked in his blood between tightly-clenched teeth.

When I lifted my head, Athos was looking down at me from his high horse, and his face was more alive with emotion than it had been during the attack. I licked my lips, tugged off one glove, pulled out my handkerchief and wiped my mouth carefully. Athos smiled, his eyes the colour of embers.

His dumb factotum was already busy dragging the dead men from the path; he rolled a body into the bog and, with a vile and impatient gesture, urged Bazyli to help. Bazyli: my new shield-bearer, who cowered in the saddle of his horse, shaking so hard that he made his mount dance nervously. I approached him and put my hand on the bridle.

“Help him,” I said. Bazyli stared at me dumbstruck.

I raised my eyebrows in a mocking grimace that, I fancy, I had picked up from Athos. “Did you not hear me? Did I get myself a deaf squire, as foil to Sir Athos’ dumb one?”

The boy was still staring at me in the agony of terror, and I had half a mind to drink him, too. My thirst was by no means quenched.

In the spirit of Christian charity – for we were headed for the Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem – I let him live. I pulled him off the horse and pushed him towards Grigoriy. “Grigoriy is dumb,” I told him. “He’d had his tongue torn out by infidels.” Grigoriy opened his mouth obediently and treated us to the gruesome sight. “The inability to gossip has served him well.” I tightened my grip around Bazyli’s arm. “One may even say, it helped him survive.”

We would reach Marienburg Castle tomorrow. Tonight, we stayed in the “Wild Aurochs”, where our armour and our coats-of-arms had been all the passport we needed to be given the best and cleanest room the host had to offer. “Tell me you’re not going to drink the boy,” Athos said once we’d found ourselves alone. "Grigoriy can't possibly tend to your armour and mine."

If Athos wanted to say anything else, his words turned into a groan when I whirled around and slammed him into the door. He gasped, winded, staring into my souls as I pinned him to the door with my body. A slow smile spread across his features. “You’re angry.”

Rage shook me, and I shook him in turn, my fingers digging into the flesh of his upper arms. “What do you think? You didn’t even draw your sword. You let me do all the work.”

“You enjoyed it.”

“Do you wish to be slashed open by peasants and bleed out like a hog?” I shook him again. “Is that it? Because if writhing on the ground in a pool of blood is what you want, I'll be happy to oblige.”

He wrenched one arm from my grip with a shrug and stroked the side of my face with his knuckles. “There was no need for us both to befoul our blades with the blood of marsh slime. I knew you’d protect me, kitten.”

I grabbed his wrist, yanked his hand down and threw him across the room. He landed on the bed, panting, his hair and clothes in disarray. I was above him and around him in a flash. He was broader and, I am loath to admit, stronger than me, but I was faster.

My speed notwithstanding, I would have had a much harder time restraining him had he struggled. But he was uncharacteristically subdued. For a brief moment I even suspected that it was guilt that made him submit meekly to my rage. He lay where I had flung him on the mattress, clinging to the bedframe with one hand. The other hand tangled in the thick fur of the bear pelt that covered the bed. His docility fuelled my rage. I hung above him, my blood a-boil, my vision narrowed like that of a drunk. I caught sight of my own hand: in its black leather glove it resembled the talons of a bird of prey. My groping fingers clenched around his discarded flagrum. Athos gasped and bucked beneath me in an attempt to throw me off, but I was quicker and landed a lash across his shoulder.

Athos pushed me off and rolled away. “I didn’t feel that,” he said, patting his breastplate. “You will have to hit me in the face, kitten.”

For the curl of his lips alone I should have whipped him across the face. Yet my hand faltered and flinched. I snarled at him and his dark liquid gaze dropped to my fangs that were poised to strike like those of an adder.

I could not chastise him by drinking his blood. He gave himself over willingly, presenting the fluted Corinthian column of his neck to me. The mocking challenge in his eyes was unmistakable.

His gasp of surprise was music to my ears: I had seized him, flipped him over and brought the whip down on his arse and thighs with a hiss. Athos hissed also, his body jolted in an attempt to get away from the lashing, but I had hooked my hand under the rim of his cuirass at the back of his neck and held him in place. The whip came down again, and again. Athos’ body shuddered under the onslaught, and he choked as the breastplate dug into his throat.

It was a glorious sight. My lover, always so composed and self-possessed, always in control of himself and of me, even in those moment when he had his blood drained, was panting, coughing – begging perhaps, even though I couldn’t discern any words through the mist in my head.

The flogging didn’t hurt him, protected by his leather breeches as he was. What stung was the indignity of being chastised like a commoner. I knew I would not be getting an apology from him (and, at that point, I don’t know if an apology was what I wanted): this moment of primal joy as I punished him for being his magnificent, haughty self was my way of imparting penitence on the unrepentant.

I sensed the change even before he consciously moved to accommodate it. It was a change in his scent, in the lines of his body. Before I had time to react to it, he curved his spine and pressed his groin into the bed. I gasped, blood cascading wildly through my body and into my cock. My arousal rushed back with full and dizzying force. Athos, prone on his stomach, thrusting his arse in the air towards the whip, almost undid me on the spot. My head spun, I groaned, let go of the top of his cuirass and shoved my hand under its bottom edge instead, pressing my palm into the small of his back, pressing down on it with my full weight, forcing his body into a painful arch. He clung to the bed, to the bear fur with the fingers of both hands, and I knew that the hardness in his breeches matched mine.

I brought the flagrum down one last time, and Athos groaned and pulled in his knees, his legs spread wide.

Amidst the turmoil of rage and arousal, I had reached a plateau of calm. I leaned over him and pressed my mouth into the tangled hair. “You filthy reprobate,” I muttered into his ear. Athos groaned – arousal or embarrassment, I could not tell. “What do you want? Tell me.”

He choked out a laugh. “The breastplate,” he writhed under me and winced. “It’s beginning to hurt.”

Once I had freed him from his armour, I saw no point stopping there: I tugged his doublet and breeches off him, peeled off the leather sitting astride him, keeping him immobilised with my weight, with my legs hooked around his, with my hands pressing into his flesh. And with my mouth, too, for I had fastened my lips to the side of his neck from behind and pressed the tips of my teeth into his skin without breaching it.

The fine linen of his shirt caressed and concealed the contours of his body. But I didn’t need to see them to know how tense his muscles were that formed the planes of his back, how they shuddered under his skin at the slightest touch. I crouched on the bed beside him, one knee on the bed, the other on his back, forcing him to lie still as I lifted the hem of his shirt. I pulled off one glove and dragged my nails over the swell of his arse. Athos bucked beneath me and swore. “Shh, my love,” I muttered, kneading his arse with both hands. “Spread your legs for me. No?” For he didn’t stir; only his muscles clenched. “You spread your legs for the whip but not for me?” I slapped him lightly with my gloved hand, and he arched into the chastisement with another pained groan, presenting his arse to me like one begging to be buggered.

Never before had it occurred to me to wonder why we hadn’t done that yet. Why, in all those weeks, he had always been taking me. Was it because fucking him and feeding from him would be too much?

I hadn’t been feeding on him lately. When we lay together, which we did almost every night and often in the light of day also, I held back my desire and ignored my hunger for that potent essence that had lured me in.

I peeled off my second glove as well and snaked my hand between his legs and underneath him, feeling for his cock. It was as hard as I’d expected, as hard as my own. Athos was lying quite still: he had long stopped struggling, only his back moved up and down with laboured breaths. My own breathing sped up in sympathy.

I slipped off Athos’ back, reached into his coffer for the alabaster jar that he kept meticulously replenished and was back by his side just as he’d heaved himself fully onto the bed on trembling arms. My own clothes had disappeared somewhere along the way.

“Spread your legs for me,” I whispered again. The prospect rendered me dizzy. Had I ever envisioned it, the messy, angry rutting on a mouldy bear fur would not have had any part in my fantasy. And yet here we were.

This time, he complied. He remained still and silent and I couldn’t see his face, but I saw lust sleet off him like vapour. Saw it in the lines of his body, in the tension of muscles and the slant of his shoulders. Saw it in the arch of his back.

Do not think that my anger had evaporated. Fury seethed deep in the pit of my stomach and churned in my groin. Yet my touch, as I slipped a finger inside him, was gentle. Athos was panting, and sweat pooled in the small of his back. I pressed my open mouth to his glistening skin and tasted the salt of the ocean.

With his arse stuck in the air and his legs splayed, I could have taken him just like that. His shirt had ridden up and he was pressing his nose into its collar as he burrowed his face into the bed. One hand still clung to the wooden bedframe, and with the other he cupped the back of his own neck, as though attempting to shield it from my fangs.

It was not his blood that I was after. I knelt between his legs and watched his body shiver as it learned to accommodate me. I squeezed myself into the tight ring, and Athos melted around me. His flesh turned into liquid heat, and he pushed back, taking me in all the way.

My heart stopped. The fury that had erupted during the skirmish in the woods was still trapped in my cock, whence it sent sharp bursts through my groin. But my chest was filled with a different kind of heat: marrow-deep tenderness spouted to the surface, gushed into my throat, making me pant and choke, and poured into my hands, making them tremble against Athos’ skin. This… this… I didn’t have a word for it. It was not hunger, for I didn’t want to feed. As I leaned over him and mouthed at his damp skin, I tasted leather and metal, the salt and the acerbity of his sweat. It would have been so easy to mask those flavours of a human, of a soldier, by piercing his skin and drinking his divine essence. Yet I didn’t try to feed.

“Athos?” I said into his ear. There was something eerie about his silence. “Do you… like this?”

He barked out a laugh and my breath caught. He turned his head and I saw his bitten lips, his half-lidded eyes, the deep flush of his skin. Could it be the same man whose haughty composure I had lamented only a few hours ago? I pressed my lips to his cheekbone, slid them along the ridge of his jaw down to the corner of his mouth. My hand fumbled around his waist and collided with his as we both reached for his cock at the same time.

I spilled myself first, panting into his skin as fury shot from my body in the cleansing throes of my climax. He followed moments later, his body clamping down on me, his spine curving into my chest, his teeth digging into my hand. His muttered words came out muffled, and I fancied I distinguished the sound of my own name, but nothing more.

The next time he spoke, it was to chide me. “You could have at least spread your own blanket on the bed.” He squirmed and tugged his shirt down to cover as much of his body as possible. “This fur is teeming with vermin.”

“You can take a bath tomorrow, I’m sure the bathhouses of Marienburg are splendid.” Grown up in a Greek nation, Athos was as fastidious about cleanliness as I was. “If,” I added, for even though my burning fury had evaporated, I felt I had not made my displeasure sufficiently clear. “If you survive the rest of the journey.”

His mouth, so finely-cut, twitched in a half-smile. “Is that a threat, sweet flittermouse?”

I draped myself over his shoulder and bit down on the shell of his ear. “Don’t you think you can do that again,” I muttered in as menacing a tone as my dishevelled déshabillé permitted.

He rolled his shoulders into me and brushed his thumb over the jut of my wristbone. “You can,” he whispered.

 

 

 

***

I didn’t sleep that night. The blood of the Masurian peasant thrummed through me and poured energy into my veins and muscles. I could have gladly ridden through the night (and just as gladly encountered another troop of savages; I licked my lips and teeth at the merest idea). But immortal and indestructible as he was, Athos was slave to his human vessel to a greater extent than I was to mine. He slept with his forehead nestled to my shoulder and his fingers entangled in mine.

 _Ah, upon your breast_  
_I lie, languish,_  
_And your blossoms, your grass_  
_press upon my heart._

Say what you will about the Germans, their poets and thinkers knew about passion. Goethe had never met Athos (for the 18th century was when my godling and I were apart, through no fault of his), and yet young Johann Wolfgang had contrived in his Sturm und Drang ode to Ganymede to capture the quint-essence of our bond.

 _You cool the burning_  
_Thirst of my bosom,_

Had I ever told Goethe how Athos had called me his Ganymede? I must have done. I used to huff at the moniker, deemed it beneath me to be assigned the role of cup-bearer, whom the Romans called Catamitus. I must have told Goethe about the poems, too, with which my Achaean used to praise his demon. For one day I found the ode among my papers that was not entirely written in my own hand (my German, albeit fluent, was not sufficiently sophisticated to enable me to compose exalted poetry).

I read it with a beating heart. I was five hundred years old; a Ganymede no longer. Yet suddenly, I longed for the long-gone days of youth and for my idol, who had swooped down on me like an eagle, like his father Zeus had swooped down on Ganymede, and carried me off to Olympus to feed me on nectar and ambrosia. Across time and space, Athos was calling out to me, and I knew what I had to do: I would find him, and I would reunite us. Like I had done that night in Marienburg.

 _There calls the nightingale_  
_Lovingly for me from the misty vale._  
_I come, I come!_  
_Whither, ah whither?_


	3. Chapter 3

**Marienburg/Malbork, Poland - 1395**

Snow fell on Nogat, covering the river ice in a fragile, starlike sheen. From the ramparts of Ordensburg Marienburg, or Malbork Castle - as it is known in your time, we could see a messenger approaching, draw bridges hastening over multiple moats to greet him. I recognized the insignia on his cloak - he carried news from Zawisza.

“About damn time,” Aramis groused next to me. 

It had been two months since we had arrived in our ambassadorial capacity, on a mission as much of reconnaissance as it was diplomatic. In the year of Aramis’ Lord 1395, the Teutonic fortress was approaching the final throes of its own behemoth sprawl, and housed roughly three thousand specimens of that _Homo Germanicus_ race that would give us so much trouble in the coming years. The cavernoma of three castles merged by metastasis into one towering compensation mechanism caused me great amusement upon our first arrival.

“I’m not sure if it’s _quite_ large enough, though,” I said to my beloved, once our hosts had left us to freshen up in our rooms.

“Say what you like about its girth,” he smiled, “but it is quite well fortified.” He made notes in his journal, no doubt for the purpose of giving message to our banner leader back in Krakow.

“Indeed,” I mused. “One would have to overextend one’s forces in order to cause the smallest breach.”

“How long, do you think,” he asked, with a spark of glee in his eyes, “such a siege might last?”

“With or without dysentery?”

We had both laughed, for nothing embodied the human condition quite like the plight of shitting oneself to death. Not everyone had the luxury to die of a broken heart, after all. I should’ve counted myself lucky. Still, in those days, I had to force myself to do the only thing I could, the one thing I’ve learned to excel in other than the slaughter - I pretended _it_ wasn’t happening.

Back upon the ramparts, I turned towards him and playfully pulled the hood of his cloak even lower over his face, making the virgin flakes of snow shake all around him into a flurried halo.

“Let’s go see what Zawisza bids us,” I said.

“Can I eat the messenger if it’s something tedious?”

“I don’t have to dignify that with a reply, do I?”

“Maybe just a nibble then.”

“You are surrounded by thousands of our potential foes, Aramis. Leave the help alone.”

I could feel it in the set of his bones as well as my own - he craved blood. More in the metaphorical, rather than the physical sense, but still, we were both becoming restless at Marienburg. There were only so many dinners you could attend with the local dignitaries until one side or the other is expected to make their move. The Knights claimed they did not want war. Jogaila (for I preferred his pagan name) claimed he did not want war. I was becoming convinced that the only ones who wanted the war were indeed just Aramis and myself, and, I had to secretly hope, also Zawisza. For what was a knight without the glory of battle? Just a fat feudal lord, playing horsie with his five fat children.

The message received and the messenger dispatched whole and unharmed, we cloistered ourselves away from prying eyes. Just as we had hoped, Zawisza was getting tired of the stalemate. The phantom spectre of the Teutonic fist over Poland was to no one’s liking. He had sent word with terms, or rather accusations, that we were to lay at the feet of one Ulrich von Jungingen, Hochmeister of the Order.

“I shall speak to him alone,” I said, gnawing slowly on a piece of dry sausage that Grigoriy had pilfered from his Germanic brethren.

“Over my undead body.” His eyes sparked with an infernal fire. I spread my arms in a gesture of bewilderment and misapprehension. “You’re going to say or do something rash.”

“To what end?” I enquired, not entirely convinced of the inaccuracy of his assessment.

“To your usual end, which is your own amusement. Frequently at the expense of others.” Well, he wasn’t wrong. “Besides, you have a foul temper.”

“Look at how perfectly calm I am. I am like a lake, all still waters and a placid surface.” I refilled my cup with wine and took a slow sip.

My demonic lover shook his head, unconvinced, and reached for the wine, taking it out of my hand to bring it to his own lips.

“I’m not the one who threatened to eat the messenger,” I added, taking a calculated risk on his ire.

Aramis flashed me his teeth. They were perfectly human, yet none the less terrifying in a certain light. I reached across the table and clasped his hand with my own.

“I…” Alone with him for many months now, and still I couldn’t quite make words form properly in his presence. “I promise. I won’t do anything rash.”

He held my gaze for a few beats, his mind calculating. I wondered whether his hypnotic abilities extended to me as well as the mere mortals around us. I certainly always had the semblance of free will when we were together, but was it all an illusion? Did it make me push back harder back then? And would he have gotten bored if I hadn’t? I suppose I shall never know.

“I’ll accompany you as far as the antechamber,” he finally spoke.

But I gather I should tell you why Zawisza had sent us to Marienburg in the first place, since Aramis had chosen to concentrate on tangential events in his own narrative. (Tangential events - you see? I was truly excelling at this whole ‘denial’ thing that your modern psychotherapists like so much to talk about.)

We may have mentioned before that Poland, by marriage to Lithuania, had played Godmother to the formerly pagan country, and the two now presented a unified and Christian front to all their would-be enemies. We had no reason to believe that Lithuania, albeit a tyro in the Christian landscape, was anything but earnest in her beliefs. The Teutonic Knights, however, professing with an overabundance bordering on baroque their love of Christ, were not convinced of these beliefs, and used every artifice at their disposal to spread rumors of diabolical activity within the Polish and Lithuanian borders. You can imagine that Jogaila and his bride Jadwiga, the paragon of all Christian virtues, were not very pleased about this vicious slander. Especially as it led to a ceaseless inundation of crusaders, filling up the Polish-Lithuanian borders at the Teutonic behest like some kind of an Old Testament plague.

Now, I knew better than most about the truth to some of these alleged demonic rumors, seeing as I had been sharing my bed with one such being for nearly a year. But _damn_ if I was going to let these Germanic pricks walk over the lovely Poles with their sacrosanct pretensions and might-makes-right mentality. Zawisza’s message spoke of the latest ludicrous rumor that the Knights of the Order appeared to have been spreading: a water sprite in the Nogat that demanded human sacrifices. I laughed at the very thought of it. The Polish water sprites, or _rusałki_ , didn't _demand_ human sacrifice. They were quite capable of taking all the humans they desired without any help. The fact that Ulrich von Jungingen had sunk to spreading such base gossip lowered him in my eyes tremendously, regardless of the height to which he had risen within his own Order.

As promised, Aramis had accompanied me to the antechamber. His hand rested briefly upon my own. 

“Remember your promise,” my beloved whispered as we parted.

“Have faith, kitten,” I whispered back, squeezing his hand while he scowled at me in that way that made me want to place fervent kisses into the crease of his brow.

I wasn’t about to have him in the room with me when I had to look the Hochmeister in the eyes and tell him the closest thing I could muster to the truth.

“Your Excellency,” I began, when we were finally alone. “Poland is a Christian country, faithful to the law of Christ, and does not tolerate knowingly any demons walking about its baptised lands.”

“Aye, so you say,” Ulrich remained seated whilst I addressed him. “But we are not spreading these tales ourselves, mein Herr. There are witness accounts of demonic activity in these parts.”

“Drunkards and fools, my lord, with all due respect.” I gave a curt bow, to emphasize the aforementioned respect. “On my word as a nobleman, I have been in this country for some time and I am yet to encounter a Polish demonic presence.” I did not think that violated the Chivalric Code. Aramis wasn’t Polish. So what if his existence alone gave credence to whatever else the Knights had been insinuating, and within their very walls. “The Poles are a pious people, governed over by pious rulers.”

“But what of the accounts of the sacrifices on the Nogat!” Ulrich pointed a dessicated finger upwards, as if accusing his own God.

“None substantiated, my lord. My rulers ask that you cease giving them credence.” I paused to let my request sink in. “Too long has the Order given sanctuary to a warlike people entering the Polish borders upon the pretence of your Holy Inquisition.” I may have been pushing it, but I also saw no reason to continue to be coy. Ulrich knew why we had been sent as well as we did. He may have been the enemy, but he was no fool. 

“You forget yourself, mein Herr,” his temper simmered under his skin and I could smell his irritation rise into the air. 

The haughty tone that he had dared take with me - me, the son of Zeus - had made the fine hairs rise on the back of my neck in barely suppressed rage. Only the memory of Aramis’ face accusing me of rashness made me bite my tongue.

“No, my lord. I remember myself as well as my audience,” I replied, keeping my tone as glacial as the waters of the Nogat in winter. 

His eyes narrowed and passed over my face. “What is it that your Master asked you to tell me, mein Herr? Or are you and your companion simply assassins sent into my lair?”

I could have spat in his face then and there, the wretched scum. Assassins? If we had wished his death, he would have been dead ten times over, and half his so-called army too. 

“Your Excellency,” I grit through my teeth, “If you are levying accusations upon the Polish people, we only request that you investigate them to the fullest extent of the law before unleashing your crusader scourge upon these virgin lands.”

He smiled, showing me his rotting teeth that seemed to reflect the very core of his debased soul.

“We shall investigate, indeed. And to ascertain that Poland doesn’t raise a demonic horde against us in our inquisitions, I shall request that one of you stay here with us, in Ordensburg Marienburg. As my honored guest, of course.”

A prisoner. He wanted one of us to stay as hostage. It was an old trick and one I didn’t mind letting him think he could play. Silently, I took off my sword and placed it across his desk. Then I had removed my dagger and placed it next to my sword. And for the finishing touch, I had unbuttoned my doublet and exposed my chest to the impious monk-knight so that he could see that I wasn’t wearing any chainmail underneath my chemise. 

“Does Your Excellency require anything else?”

He looked upon me like a man foiled in his own scheme. Clearly, he had not expected me to capitulate so willingly. That gave me pleasure.

“Mein Herr, you do not need to…”

Aha! I had him trapped. He had been, if you excuse my turn of phrase, attempting to blow hot air up his own arse. He wanted a political prisoner about as much as a man might desire a scrofulous chancre. 

“I insist, my lord. I stake my honor on the Christian virtues of the Polish people. I am your prisoner,” I repeated, with more doggedness this time. Ire flashed in his eyes and I had to lower my head to obscure my wicked grin from his piercing gaze.

“And what if, mein Herr, we do find proof of demonic presence in Poland?” he asked, attempting to dissuade me from my stubborn resolution.

“Then, sir, you shall have to do what honor and your mission bids you to do. Which, I suppose, is to kill me.” I bowed curtly and awaited his decision.

Had Ulrich been a skilled politician, he would’ve seen this for the gambit that it was and contrived an excuse to let me go. However, I fear I may have underestimated his apprehension of Slavic demons, or his general dislike for being baited.

“Very well, mein Herr von Thebes. You are arrested.”

He rang the bell on his desk and I cursed under my breath in my native Greek.

“If there is a message you’d like to give to your ambassadorial companion…” Ulrich began as two guards walked in and stood flanking me. “Perhaps you can let him know that you’ll be well tended to in your confinement.” I smelled the lie in the air as sure as I smelled his rancid breath.

“Your Excellency is exceedingly kind,” I replied in such a tone that I was certain he had heard my true intent.

I had now before me the opportunity to write to Aramis. I turned towards the small writing desk and dipped the quill into the inkwell, trying to picture what I would say to him.

_Aramis, I am arrested._

That was neither here nor there. Any fool would tell him I’d been arrested. Meanwhile, the Hochmeister, at the end of his tether, bored two hot holes into the back of my skull and tore at his cuticles with frenzied hands.

_Aramis, I’m remaining a prisoner here because I’m bored._

But he would kill me if he could. I smirked.

 _Aramis, honor calls._ Ha! He would see through it. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Annoy the Brotherhood whilst enjoying the chase. At last, I had resolved myself and scribbled my note.

_Tell my Delilah that I love her. In this world or the next - I’ll be waiting._

I didn’t bother folding the piece of parchment, but rather handed it to the Hochmeister in the same blatant way as a few minutes ago I had exposed my chest. In his turn, Ulrich hadn’t bothered pretending not to read it, the shameless weasel.

“Take Herrn von Thebes to the tower,” he ordered the guards. 

As I was walked by the back passageway out of the Hochmeister’s cabinet, I thought of my flittermouse, and whether he would come for me, or use this opportunity to spread his leathery wings and fly away for good.

***

_Love._

He had the fucking gall to drag love into this.

I clenched my hands and ground my teeth so fiercely that sparks flew. _“Tell my Delilah that I love her. In this world or the next - I’ll be waiting,”_ his writ had said, combining in its succinct brevity everything that was most infuriating about him.

I knew that love for a woman had been the cause of his downfall. He walked away, unconcerned, picking up his Ganymedes, his Hyacinthuses, his Antinouses, his _eromenoi_ along the way. He had time. He had eternity. He could wait for his love, his _Delilah_ , to be returned to him. In this world or the next.

I ground my teeth and Bazyli, who was dressing me, cowered as if I had hit him. I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him back, and he pulled my surcoat over my chainmail. His services were subpar at best, but he was a good horseman, spoke passable Latin and understood that my manuscripts and folios required particular care.

 _My_ surcoat. The white surcoat with the black cross which I had ordered him to steal from the Marienburg laundries. I liked to keep a steady supply of clerical garbs in my coffer, for the monk’s habit and the priest’s cassock had always served me well in the past.

“Take the horses and wait across the river,” I told the grooms, who stood silent, waiting for my orders. “I’m going to fetch Sir Athos, who has been detained.” I noticed Grigoriy press his lips together and glance over my shoulder at the Teutonic behemoth that loomed behind us into the night sky.

After I had been commissioned with carrying letters to the King and informed that Athos would remain the Order’s guest at his own request, I'd left the castle straightaway. Days were short and dusk had been falling when I'd found myself on the drawbridge, closely followed by Bazyli and Grigoriy. Grigoriy, who had insisted on staying with his master, but I'd chosen to ignore his frantic gesticulations. Athos would never forgive me for leaving his faithful dogsbody at the mercy of those sons of Belial.

My return to the nest of vipers, then. The guard at the gate was easy; he barely acknowledged me as I rode past him. I had long learned that I could make humans grant me entrance to their dwellings by employing a smile or a haughty glare. (Ever since I’d met Athos, I had perfected my haughty glare, basing my own expression of aloof disdain on his.) Curiously, they always believed me to be who I claimed to be. Even here, in the fearsome fortress constructed with the purpose of penetrating Polish lands with Teutonic erections, manned by thousands of Teutonic warriors, I faced no difficulties. I rode into the courtyard wrapped in the white cape of a Teutonic Knight as if in a funeral shroud, and not one of the brethren appeared to remember that they had seen me every day for two months, when I enjoyed their hospitality as ambassador of the Polish king and wore the colours of Zawisza of Garbów.

I wasn’t quite sure what kind of power it was that enabled me to disguise myself in plain sight, yet it was a power that I most definitely possessed and which had served me well in the hundred years of my undead existence.

This wasn’t the time to dwell on my mysterious skills. I steered my steed across the torch-lit courtyard without bothering to keep to the shadows. A group of _knechts_ moved out of my way obediently, and I left them behind and disappeared in the darkness hulking at the foot of the east wing. That was where Athos was kept; they had not – yet – thrown him into the dungeons. He was, officially, a political hostage, a guest rather than a prisoner. But it wouldn’t be ere long that they’d drop all pretences and treat him in the same way that they’d treated other men who had offended their delicate sensibilities. I had seen the bloodlust in their eyes, smelled it in the pungent odour of their sweat and their rising blood, heard it in the timbre of their voice.

Athos was… No. Athos had been… He had been… Mine. He was mine. I felt my fangs sharpen at the mere thought of a filthy Germanic upstart laying hands on the body that was sacred to me.

The body that was more mine than ever before. The day we arrived at Marienburg was the day after that night… the night when he had permitted me. When he had given himself to me. A hand reached into my ribcage and clenched around my heart, pressing out blood that cascaded down to my loins. I glanced up the sheer brick wall, scanning it for the window to the cell that had been my and Athos’ home for two months and was now Athos’ prison.

Did he lie on the solitary bed thinking of me?

Did he know that I was coming for him?

Or did he think me a faithless creature, who would abandon him the moment he went and did something stupid? He called me a kitten, a creature known for its caprice and its wavering loyalties.

He’d called me his Delilah, once. My heart shuddered in my breast. Did he expect me to emasculate him and leave him at the mercy of his foes? Aggravating as he often was, I enjoyed his attempts at vexing me as much as I enjoyed the ways he thought up to reconcile us again. He was the only man in one hundred years to whose moralising I gladly submitted.

Did he fear betrayal?

I was halfway up the wall when this thought manifested itself in my wildly reeling mind. I stopped, panting around the sword between my teeth, and resisted the urge to let go with one hand and wipe the sweat from my brow. The fall wouldn’t kill me, but I didn’t relish the prospect of pain.

Above my head, light glowed in the window behind which my Athos was waiting. Beneath me spun the dark void. I crouched on the wall, suspended between Heaven and Hell, and the Snow Maidens swirled around me in their mad dance that lured mortal men to their doom.

I shook off the snowflakes that had settled on my shoulders with a shrug and continued my climb, gliding up the stone wall as if on wings. I burst through the window in a flurry of snow and the shatter of crown glass. Athos, who had stood by the fireplace staring pensively into the flames, whirled around.

I wrenched my sword out from between my teeth and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, panting.

“ _Blood_.”

He blinked, and I advanced, fixing my eyes on him from beneath my lowered brow. For a moment, it looked like he’d take a step back, and I almost saw his hand twitch as if to grab his sword. Would he had gone for it, had it hung by his side? As it was, he faced me unarmed. Was it out of necessity? Or was he giving his life in my hands, because he trusted me?

I stopped within a breath’s width before him, my teeth and fists clenched tight, my nostrils flaring. His scent overpowered me like it had all those months ago. It filled the small chamber; it filled my lungs, my head.

“Let me drink from you.” My fingers alighted on his neck, and he didn’t flinch. “Let me taste you.” I could feel his veins rise to the surface at the sound of my voice.

He didn’t speak. He tipped his head back, his jugular throbbing under the white skin, and I swooped down on him and bored my fangs into him. His body jolted into mine, his throat moaned, and I clamped my mouth over his flesh and _sucked_.

Liquid life gushed forth and exploded in my mouth. A stream of sunlight. Nectar of the gods. The blood of the covenant. I gasped and choked around the potion that flooded my mouth and poured down my throat. I knew. Then and there I knew what it meant to be me. This was the true Eucharist. This was communion with the gods.

I pulled my mouth off him with an obscene noise. My hand on the nape of his neck, threading through the lush locks that were already damp with sweat that I had brought about. My chest pressed to his, my leg between his; he was clinging to me with both arms and I felt his knees buckle. He rolled his neck and nestled his cheek against mine with a soft sigh that tingled in my ear. “Angel,” he breathed, both hands tangled in my hair, thumbs resting on my cheekbones, and a shudder ran from the top of my skull all the way down to my toes. “My angel.”

I let myself fall into his embrace. His arms slid down from my hair, my shoulders and around my back. My forehead in the crook of his neck, the imprint of my blood-stained mouth on the pristine white linen of his shirt like the image of Our Lord on the Veil of Veronica.

“You’ve got to come with me.” I freed myself from his arms, shaking from the rush of blood. He was regarding me with serious dark eyes.

“I can’t.”

No less than I had expected. Still, it made my blood rise.

“Do you think,” I grabbed his wrist and yanked him towards me, “that I climbed the wall for nothing?”

“You were hungry I assume.” He pressed his open palm against his neck, where the wound was healing already. “Now you’re satiated.”

“Athos,” I said, my voice so rough he would have called it a snarl. “I didn’t come here to feed.”

“No?” He regarded me coolly. “If I may remind you, your first word was ‘blood’.”

I snarled then, and watched his mouth thin into that sardonic line that made me want to tear him apart and fuck him into oblivion. “You gigantic ass.” I teetered on the verge, ready to strike with my claws. “How do you think I got here? I had to turn into that… thing.” _That thing that had crawled out of the grave._ “To climb up the sheer wall.” I gasped in a sharp breath to steady myself, my hands knotted into tight fists.

Even after all those decades, I didn’t quite know how it worked. I could get anywhere I wished. Anywhere I sensed prey. But when I did, my nature claimed its due. I was half-man, half-mad, the thirst for blood rose like a red fog inside my head and I had to quench it. I had come for Athos, and I had to take him.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. His gaze fell on my middle, around which I had slung a rope. It fulfilled the twofold function of holding up my surcoat and of making a passable means of escape. “I have given my word. I have to stay here.” He raised his eyes to mine. “My honour is at stake.”

There was so much I wanted to throw in his face then. About casting pearls before swine. About his honour being wasted on men who took their pleasure in torturing bodies and condemning souls. But this was not the time for a theological debate. I closed my eyes, grabbed a fistful of his shirt that gaped open over his breast and pulled him closer. “What if Delilah asked you?”

His heartbeat pounded against my knuckles.

“That was,” he swallowed hard and I felt the effort it cost him to cling to self-control. “That was a narrative device-”

I tugged him towards me and kissed him on that insolent mouth. “I’m leaving now,” I growled. “Come with me. Unless,” I kissed him again, much more gently, caressing the ridge of his lip with my tongue, “unless you value honour more highly than love,” I whispered.

Athos groaned and melted into me, and for a while there was nothing but the heat of his mouth and the insistent pressure of his hard body against mine. His hands were already busy undoing the knots of the rope around my middle, and my surcoat fell down almost to my ankles. “I must dress,” he said, extricating himself from my arms. His hand lingered in mine even as he cast a look around the room, as if scanning it for his possessions.

“Hurry.” I tied the rope around an iron bar by the chimney and threw the other end out of the window. Athos was pulling on his doublet and gloves. He picked up his flagrum, fur, and flask, wrapped them in his cloak, and flung the bundle into the darkness. “You first,” I said.

A small smile curled in the corners of his mouth. “You don’t trust me,” he said and touched his fingertips to the side of my face.

I turned my head and kissed them, my eyes never releasing his. “Not trust you to make the right choice between men who want to rip out your tongue and myself?” I seized his hand and kissed the inside of his wrist, the blue veins flashing between the rim of his glove and his cuff. “You should know I’m more conceited than that.”

He laughed, and I laughed with him, pushing and prodding him towards the window. “Go.”

He looked at me. “What about you?”

“I don’t exactly need the rope,” I said. “As long,” I hesitated for the span of a breath. “As long as you’ll let me drink your blood again.”

His smile turned into something else altogether, and his dark eyes gleamed like gemstones. “Always,” he breathed and gripped the rope. “Aramis. Always.”

***

Athos never said, and I never asked. The way Grigoriy was always there, always in the shadows, watching him. Watching over him. Grigoriy, not I, knew what Athos needed. He had been with Athos how long? I didn’t know.

I cast a sidelong glance at my lover. He was pale, his face the colour of snow, translucent and delicate, and my heart clenched. I pressed his hand and he turned his head and looked at me, forcing a feeble smile upon his features.

“Forgive me,” I whispered.

“Forgive you for what?” He pressed my hand in his turn and I felt my fingers and my heart unfreeze. “For saving me?”

My eyes darted to his neck. Athos was smiling still, an ancient smile, such as I had seldom seen on him. “Don’t apologise for this,” he whispered. “This is yours to take.”

He was so very faint. After we had descended the tower, I had thrown myself on him to drink again, my dark nature driving me on regardless of his needs. I hadn’t stopped until I felt him sway and grow heavy in my arms. He had been staring at me, through me, with eyes that were huge and dark and sightless. I’d wrapped him in my cloak, helped him on the horse and led him out of the darkness, through the courtyard and across the drawbridge. The guard tried to stop us – my mysterious powers didn’t work when I had someone else with me. But he was powerless against the argument of my dagger through his throat. He fell from the bridge with barely a gasp, and when I turned around to grace the castle with a parting glance, I fancied I saw a sanguine flower blossom beneath his body on the ice that covered the Nogat, beneath which the water sprites capered in a frivolous jig.

“How are you feeling?” I whispered. My hand was wrapped around his so tightly I couldn’t tell which were my fingers and which his.

“Good,” he said, closed his eyes and opened them again. “Safe.”

He was looking up into the star-strewn sky, and I was looking at him. His white skin glowed in the dark, marred only by the dark shadows under his eyes that I had put there through my immoderate greed for his blood. I could still taste it on my tongue and lips, and it made me feel alive and full of vigour and heat. So much heat that I had a lot of it to spare. He was cold, I sensed it even through the layers of fabrics and fur. I twisted my head and glanced at Grigoriy, whose back was turned on us. He wouldn’t see a thing. And even if he did-

Grigoriy. I ground my teeth in sudden and irrational irritation. When Athos and I had joined Grigoriy and Bazyli where I had left them, Grigoriy was perched on a horse-drawn sledge, impassive and immovable like the gargoyle that he so closely resembled. Athos’ teeth were chattering when I helped him dismount and he climbed the sledge with what appeared to be his last ounce of strength. He collapsed in the box and I pulled layers of furs over him, burrowing him in them like an animal.

It had been a good idea. It was unlikely that they would find him missing tonight, and guards weren’t due to change for several hours. We didn’t have to hurry – yet. Sparing the horses was a much more sensible approach at this stage of our escape.

Were we escaping? I had been officially despatched to Krakow. Athos had agreed to stay – nay, insisted on staying. All that he had violated by leaving was his honour. If I knew anything about the Teutonic Knights (and after two months of their hospitality I had got to know them pretty well), they’d rather have a pretext to break the peace than an actual prisoner on their hands who was not a local troublemaker but a nobleman with friends in Krakow. No, they would not stir from the comfort (what they, in their austere Teutonic ways, considered “comfort”) of their castle to chase us through the forest at night.

Somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howled.

They were not dangerous yet. No, it was not until February, when hunger made them reckless, that wolves would venture out to attack humans. A group of armed men and trained war horses was safe enough from them. The weeks after midwinter were, paradoxically, a good time to travel: lakes, bogs and rivers across the country were frozen solid and were criss-crossed by sleigh tracks, and a sledge drawn by good horses on sleek snow was faster than a carriage on muddy roads.

From where I was lying by Athos’ side, all I could see was snowflakes dancing towards me, like stars falling from the winter sky, and his pallid profile. Bazyli was riding behind us; I heard the soft thud of his horse’s hooves, like heartbeat on snow-covered ground.

I rolled on my side and snaked my arm around Athos’ middle. “Remember when you showed me your brother in the sky?” My breath hung before me like a crystal cloud before the icy air shredded it to pieces.

Athos smiled, turned his head and pressed his lips to my forehead. They were very cold and dry, and I lifted my face to his and kissed him, with my mouth closed, with my eyes closed, pouring everything into that tiny patch of bare skin where we touched. My hand crawled around his ribs and beneath as I pulled myself closer to him. The furs atop us were stifling me, but they kept him warm in a way that I could not.

My hand had begun to wander, roaming the familiar contours of his body, and when it finally dipped between his legs, as it had always been bound to, I laughed softly into his mouth. “How?” I tugged at his lower lip with my teeth and he moaned. “There’s hardly any blood left in your body.”

“And you know where all that you left me with has gone to,” he replied, much too smugly for a man in his condition.

I unbuttoned him one-handedly, feeling my way around his garments and his body under the thick blanket of furs. When my hand slipped under his linen, we both gasped. He was hot and damp against my palm, and I let him slide through my hand that was much too dry, but he didn’t care. His white face became animated, his breath quickened, and he plunged his hand in after mine. He weaved his fingers through mine and half-guided, half-followed my motion as I stroked him slowly, steadily, in time with the beat of his heart, drinking in the taste of his skin with my lips. 

I knew of the things the Teutonic Knights did to their prisoners. Of men tied to iron grids over living coals. Of tongues torn out and tar trickled in in their stead. Of eyes gouged out, arms hacked to stumps, bodies broken and discarded to beg (or rather: die) by the road.

Athos knew them too, and yet he had chosen to give himself into their hands. Had he thought they would not touch him, an ambassador of the Polish king? All of a sudden, I remembered the air of invulnerability into which he was shrouded when we first met, many moons ago. I did not think him invulnerable now. Not after I’d seen him swoon; not after I’d seen him come apart under my touch as I drove into him in our bed in the Teutonic fortress.

After that first time, it had appeared that he could not get enough of being taken. He never asked, not in words, but his body curled into mine, his hands guided me, and I buried myself into the heat of him, silent and reverent like a man who entered the house of God.

That was the time when I began to notice the delicacy of his skin and his heart. I had deemed him a Grecian god of marble even as I fed on his blood. It was only when I stayed sober during our coupling that the veil had lifted and I saw the man concealed in the god.

He was human now: his face flushed, with arousal or with cold, I did not know. His skin so full of life, so supple and soft to the touch. I had curled my arm above his head, resting my gloved fingers against his cheek, while my other hand was moving at a leisurely pace between his legs, in the burrow that we had made under the furs. Each breath he expelled was a corporeal manifestation of his arousal; it shivered above his lips like a heat haze in the winter air. I would be kissing those lips soon, but not here, not in the freezing forest, not under the eyes of our grooms.

A groan escaped his mouth and hung above him like mist. In my grip, his cock twitched, his hips jerked, his arousal boiled over and spilled itself in a gush over my hand. I gasped in surprise. I had expected him to find comfort in my touch, not completion. I flattened my palm against the damp hairs on his stomach and nudged his ear with my lips. “Sleep.” His body was already growing heavy against mine. “I’m here.”

***

By the time we had arrived at a local inn, I had regained my senses and begun to lose them anew. He had come for me. My angel, my warrior of God, resplendent in his glory. He had come for me and whisked me away in that sledge, with the snow flurries burning cold against my flushed skin as if to mock me for my overabundance of weakness.

But who could say ‘no’ to Aramis? Who indeed.

He came for me. And that fact alone filled my heart and soul to the brim. That feeling that I had tried to push down, it pounded against my chest like a caged bird, it beat against my temples like an ancient drum, a summoning to prayer. _I love you. I love you. Oh Gods, I love you._ Like an outraged lion, it threatened to tear me apart from the inside if I didn’t unleash it.

I don’t recall getting out of the sledge. _Tell him_ , my heart insisted. I don’t recall how we got to the room. _Tell him, you coward,_ my mind screeched at me like a harpy. But it wasn’t my mind - it was her, Hera, the wicked step-mother, taunting me with the spectre of my own demise. _Tell him, tell him, tell him._

My head spun, perhaps from the loss of blood, perhaps from the Eumenides using it as a stomping ground for so long. I felt Aramis’ arm around me, guiding me towards the fireplace. I didn’t recall it being stoked to life. For a moment, the flames illuminated my reason, and I felt like myself again.

“You don’t look so well,” he said. His eyes were upon me, reflecting the dance of the flames, and I fell to my knees before him, wrapping my arms around his legs, pressing my face into the tight ravine of muscle in between his jutting hip bones.” _Bozhe moy!_ ” he exclaimed, fingers immediately grasping at my hair, but pressing me closer instead of pushing me away. “What have I done to you?”

He had no idea what he had done to me.

“You came for me,” I whispered into his body, holding on to him as the hurricane inside me attempted to rip me apart.

He sank slowly to his knees at my side, cradling my face with his hands as if I were porcelain. 

“Did you really think I wouldn’t?” He seemed hurt by that. As if I had somehow betrayed him by doubting him. Perhaps I had.

“It’s not… that,” I stammered. 

“Then what is it?”

“I…” Oh, good Lord! Even I was becoming disgusted with myself. “You…” _You are everything._

“Yes?”

How calmly he waited for me to pronounce my own death sentence. I smiled at him, sadly, knowing that it wasn’t his fault. No matter what, it could never be his fault. I was the one who had chosen _him_.

His hands were still on me, bolstering me, and his eyes burned into the very core of my soul.

“In Greek,” I said, leaning into his touch, “there are four words for love.” I looked up, meeting his eyes: my angel, my executioner. “And I am overcome with all of them.”

I spoke and closed my eyes, awaiting my sentence.

***

“I know only one.” My hands had moved; one was cupping his face still, the other lay flat against his chest, where my palm soaked up the throb of his heart. Its current moved into my flesh and along the length of my arm, all the way to my heart, which I could feel fall into the same rhythm as his even as I spoke. I don’t know how my voice was so calm. It was perhaps the sight of him so undone. He was giving himself to me – to what extent I hadn’t even begun to comprehend. I only recognised the extent of his faith in me later. Too late.

It was that peculiar calm that came over me in moments of the strongest, most animal agitation. I had known it in the throes of battle, when my lust for blood took over and drove me to slaughter, but my hand remained steady and my head remained cool. I had known it in the throes of fury, when my anger rendered me clear-sighted and articulate, rather than incoherent and blind. I knew it now when that wave that flooded over me in the wake of his anguished confession didn’t drown me, but buoyed me. Once again, I sensed the ocean that was in his blood and that was powerful enough to suck me under, rip me apart, throw me into rocks and burn my lungs and veins with acerbic salt. Yet, I wasn’t scared. Just like I hadn’t been scared that night when I first came to him, even though my senses had told me that he was strong enough to destroy me if he wished to. He was powerful enough to do with me as he pleased. Even when I drank his blood, it was because of the courtesy that he granted me, not because I had subjugated his body and mind. There was a tremendous sense of liberty in throwing myself at the mercy of a god-man like him.

I spoke the words in my native tongue: the language of my childhood. The language of affection, of long-lost family. Of love. His eyes snapped open and gazed into my souls, and I almost laughed. Had it been any other man, I would have suspected he didn’t understand me. But this was Athos. The only man living or dead with whom I used the forgotten tongue of my ancestral home.

He understood me better than I knew. He knew that I spoke not of _fine amor_ , that courtly love that had been my beacon on my Odyssey through the castles of my distant homeland. According to the chivalric code, _fine amor_ was a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent. Fine words, but I knew now that they had been wrongly applied to something that was a pale imitation of an emotion that burned me deep inside like the salt water of the ocean would, had I been forced to drink it.

This, I was drinking up willingly. The expression in his eyes, his mouth on mine at last, and his hands, their grip unbreakable around my hips, tugging me against him and then down. We had sunk down before the fireplace, and we were sinking further still, onto the earthen floor, onto the furs that Grigoriy had spread out to dry, and into each other. The clank of metal, and he was pulling my misericorde from its sheath and slashing through the surcoat with the black cross across the breast. He dug both hands into the gap and tore it off me.

“Don’t you like it?” I teased him, flashing my teeth at him in a smile that made him shudder.

“Disguising yourself as a monster doesn’t suit you,” he growled, his hands skipping over the fastenings of my chain mail as he proceeded to undress me at a speed worthy of his halfbrother Hermes.

“No?” I raised myself on the elbows and kissed that beautiful mouth of which I would never get enough. “It’s not a disguise. If I may remind you…” I pulled my lips back and flashed my fangs at him.

Athos exhaled a half-laugh, half-sigh, and then his body was covering mine. He pinned my hands above my head and brushed his mouth against mine, sliding his tongue delicately over the sharp points that had so often torn through his tendons and flesh.

“You are not,” he said in a tone more sombre than I had ever heard. “Aramis. You are not a monster.” And then he was kissing me, kissing my mouth, my neck, the line of my jaw all the way to my ear. “Angel,” he whispered. “Ἄγγελος.” Another kiss, like the burn of the branding iron behind my ear. “Ἄγγελέ μου.”

“You would know,” I muttered, arching into him with my head thrown back. He laughed softly, as I’d known he would, and my skin shivered with delight at the sound.

“I _am_ Greek.” He raised himself off me, straddling me, and pulled his shirt over his head. The flames cast a warm hue onto his white skin, and the marble sprang to life.

“And a god,” I whispered, tracing a path down his sternum, past his navel, and stopped by his waistband. I raised my eyes to his as if to the altar and saw that his gaze was almost black but for the golden reflections of the flames.

“What now,” he whispered.

“Take me,” I whispered back. “I’m yours.”

Ἄγγελος. _Messenger_. That’s what he’d called me, and that was what I was to him: his servant, his attendant, his lackey whom he could send out to do his bidding, obedient unto death. I would be his Gabriel, his Cherub with the flaming sword, I would protect him and serve him and not one word of complaint or protest would pass my lips. 

No. Ouch. Perhaps the one or the other would.

“Stop.” I winced and wriggled free, twisting my neck. “My hair… It’s trapped under your arm.”

“Forgive me.” He lifted my hair and kissed me on the back of my neck. “Better?”

I glanced down, to where his long fingers were wrapped around my prick. A sudden memory flashed through my mind. The first time we’d lain together – as lovers, not as foes on the battlefield – had been like that: Athos behind me, on his side, with his arms around me and his hand on my cock. He had fucked himself between my thighs then. Not tonight. Tonight, he was fucking himself into me with deep, steady thrusts, and his hipbone left bruising marks in my flesh. I was trapped between the heat of the fire and the heat of his body, and I did not know which scalded me more. His other hand was entwined with mine and I pulled it to my lips and kissed his knuckles. When I sucked in one finger, he groaned, and when I bit into it, he dug his teeth into the muscles of my shoulder.

I had drunk from him twice in the last few hours, I wasn’t to drink from him again. Instead, I lapped gently at the tiny wound, no more than a pinprick, savouring the fragrance like I would savour an expensive perfume without uncorking the bottle. The scent clung to my lips and my tongue, pushing me towards my release as he drove into me, the push and shove of his hips increasingly more erratic and desperate. Harder and harder, and he fucked me into the furs, rolling us both until I lay buried beneath him on my stomach. I arched back into him, spreading my legs, spreading my arse as he rode me with furious self-abandon. My body spasmed around him and he cried out, even as I was moaning my release into the thick fur that cushioned our groans and our fuck.

I was his Atlas after he collapsed on me, and he was my world that I balanced on my shoulders. I clung to his arm that lay around me and under me. “I’m too heavy,” he murmured, attempting to disentangle himself from me, but I wouldn’t let go.

“Not yet.” I tightened my grip around his forearm. “Stay.”

A warm puff of breath settled on the nape of my neck and I shivered. “Tell me when.” I could hear by the sound of his voice that he was already drifting off in Hypnos’ arms.

Would I sleep? My body was rested after our starlit ride in the sledge, and the blood I had taken from him was still coursing through my veins, pumping life through my limbs. But his warm breath, the slow throb of his heart that guided mine – there was such comfort in giving myself over to a power so much greater than myself. I closed my eyes and shifted in his embrace, nestling against him and prepared to seek oblivion. If the nightmares should pounce upon me tonight, he would be there to come to my rescue. My saviour, my Messiah. My Christos.


	4. Chapter 4

**Battle of Grunwald - 1410**

The plains between Grunwald, Tannenberg, and Ludwigsdorf were littered with carrion, the flesh of humans and horses alike serving up a feast to the vultures after the day was done. For fifteen years Aramis and I had been in Poland, serving under Zawisza’s banner, of which we spent roughly fourteen years waiting for a thread to break. And lo, did it break! Then War came, Ares riding into battle once more, his sister Discord whispering in his ear upon that chariot as I had seen her do at Troy.

And all our waiting had rendered thanks in blood, for a battle like this one was to forever live in history even if our own assumed names were to be long forgotten. By the fall of night, the Teutonic Order would be in tatters, their standards broken, their leaders crushed, leaving the victorious Poles and Lithuanians to write their names in the Book of Life as they deemed fit.

But not before we settled our own petty score and threw the Hochmeister like the sacrificial dog at Ares’ feet.

Our infantry had driven Ulrich von Jungingen’s men right into the Lithuanian cavalry that attacked the Knights from the rear. I spotted him in the melee from my saddle, where Aramis and I had been mounted at the standard bearer’s side. My lover and I locked gaze - our minds were united as always, and Aramis followed me silently through the raging forces, slicing our swords through the Teutonic throng with demonic glee as we advanced. 

History books will tell you that Ulrich von Jungingen fell at the Battle of Grunwald, but they are not united in precisely how he fell, or by whose hand. Some historians claim he was felled by Dobiesław of Oleśnica, whose lance had pierced his neck, while others give the honor of that kill to Mszczuj of Skrzynno, another Polish knight. How did the Grand Master fall? I will tell you.

I saw Mszczuj, lance held aloft, about to deliver a killing blow to Ulrich, but my hand alighted upon the bridle of his horse.

“Friend,” I said over the din of battle, “You must yield me this honor. The Hochmeister and I have unfinished business.”

Aramis, in the meantime, had brought his horse about right before von Jungingen’s own steed. All it took was one look from my beloved and Ulrich’s stallion reared wildly, throwing the rider to the ground. I leapt out of the saddle and in one stride stood over the Grand Master, my sword held aloft against his broken visor which exposed his pallid face.

“Do you remember me, Your Excellency?” I asked.

“Yes. You were that insolent bitch of the pagan Polish King,” he hissed through what remained of his teeth. “You escaped my clutches before I could show you my…” A coughing fit interrupted his little oration. “... My hospitality. I had such… things planned for you.”

Aramis stood next to me, his nostrils flaring.

“Let me have him,” he whispered hotly in my ear.

“We spoke once, Your Excellency, of demons in Polish lands. Do you recall?” Fear flashed in the Grand Master’s eyes as I heard Aramis’ fangs drop. I had no doubt that potent concoction of fear and blood called out to my beloved like a beacon. “I thought perhaps you might enjoy an up-close examination.”

Aramis laughed then and Ulrich screamed, but in the middle of slaughter his cry was indistinguishable from the rest. The weapon that had pierced the Grand Master’s neck did not belong to Dobiesław of Oleśnica; it belonged to Renatus of Snagov.

The battle on the plain at Grunwald lasted for ten blistering hours under the July sun, and when it was finally over, men threw down their armor and drank and sang the hymns of victory. Blood pulsed through my veins again as it once did at Troy, as it once did at Chaeronea; only this time I had no mercy and no pity for my foes. It tore at my heart to see Troy burn; I wept with Alexander over the ashes of the Theban Band. To be my rivals they had to have been my equals. In battle as in all things, the Teutonic Knights had failed to measure up.

Aramis found me by the stream, my shield and helmet long shed, and I felt his presence before beholding him, as usual. He too had been sated with the heat of battle and the blood of the fallen, more satiated than I have seen him in some time. My heart beat again in my chest like a wild bird, like the first time when he came to me all those years ago in Wallachia. Were they the birds of Ares or the birds of Eros, I cared naught. I pulled him into my arms and devoured him with every part of me. Or perhaps he had devoured me. I only remember how long it had taken us to gather up our accoutrements before returning to the camp, how we filled our helmets with spring water and drank it greedily and laughed like children in the rushing stream, while the _rusałki_ looked on and giggled into their pearl-adorned braids.

For the time being, Poland was safe, and it had been good to us. Despite our love for the Polish lands and for Zawisza Czarny, it had become clear that the time was approaching to take our leave of Jogaila’s court, for in fifteen years we were seen to barely age at all, and sooner or later someone was going to start asking questions. 

It turned out the Teutonic Knights weren’t entirely useless, for they had shown us the advantage of unifying the Church with War. At an Order like that, one didn’t have to choose to be a knight or a priest: you could be both. _We_ could be both. But we had to do it far away from Poland, or better yet, from the Slavic lands entirely. The solution had come to us unexpectedly, but once resolved we wasted no time departing. There was no sense in looking back at what we were leaving behind, we had all of eternity ahead of us still.

For the first time since we met, I was taking Aramis home with me.


End file.
